Arthur Dandridge

I have owned approximately forty thousand books in my life. I know this because my wife, Patricia, counted them once in 2004 during a conversation about whether we needed to reinforce the floor joists in our house in Durham, North Carolina. The contractor said the floor was sagging. Patricia said the floor was sagging because I had put eleven hundred pounds of books in a room designed to hold furniture. She was not wrong. We reinforced the joists and I bought a new bookcase, which Patricia observed was not the lesson she had intended me to learn.

I was born in 1954 in Greensboro, North Carolina, the second of five children. My father, Reverend Charles Dandridge, pastored Mount Olive Baptist Church for thirty-six years. My mother, Evelyn, taught sixth grade at Lincoln Elementary and was the kind of teacher whose former students still stopped her in the grocery store forty years later to tell her she was the reason they went to college. She probably was. She read to all five of us every night until we could read to ourselves, and then she gave us library cards and told us the world was in those buildings and all we had to do was walk in.

I walked in. I have not walked out.

I studied English literature at North Carolina A&T, where I discovered that the books I had been reading for pleasure were also, apparently, objects of serious study, which delighted me. I earned a master’s degree in library science from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1979 because I wanted to spend my life in rooms full of books and someone told me there was a profession for that. I worked as a reference librarian at the Durham County Library for six years. I loved the work. I loved helping people find what they were looking for, and I especially loved helping people find what they did not know they were looking for, which is the highest purpose of a library and the highest purpose of a good bookshop.

In 1985, I opened Dandridge Books on Ninth Street in Durham. It was an independent bookshop in a college town, which meant it was perpetually six months from bankruptcy and permanently full of people who cared about sentences. I ran it for twenty-two years. I hosted readings by authors who went on to win the National Book Award and by authors who sold eleven copies and deserved better. I ran a book club on Tuesday nights that met every week for nineteen years without missing once, including the Tuesday after September 11, when we were supposed to discuss “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen and instead sat in the shop and talked about what we were reading to get through the week. I remember that night better than most of the award-winning readings.

I sold the shop in 2007. The economics had changed in a way that I could see coming and could not outrun. I do not blame the internet. I blame the part of the internet that taught people to think a book’s value was its price, because a book’s value has never been its price. But the shop had a good run, and the people who came through that door over twenty-two years are the reason I know what a book can do for a person when it arrives at the right moment.

After the shop, I spent eight years teaching a seminar on contemporary American fiction at Duke as an adjunct, which is the academic system’s way of telling you they value your expertise but not enough to pay you for it. I taught because I could not stop talking about books, and students are contractually obligated to listen. I retired from teaching in 2015.

Patricia and I have been married forty-six years. She is a retired pharmacist who reads mysteries exclusively and with great speed and who has been listening to me explain why she should read literary fiction for four decades with the patience of a woman who has made her own decisions. Our son, Charles, named for my father, is a software developer in Atlanta. Our daughter, Naomi, is a librarian in Raleigh, which my mother would have considered the finest possible outcome.

I read four books a week. This is not a boast. It is a compulsion. I read new releases and I read books that came out in 1962 and I read books that everyone has heard of and books that nobody has heard of, and I will tell you about all of them. I write for this magazine because Dale Parsons asked me to write about books for an audience of people who still read, and that audience, which I know from twenty-two years behind a counter, is larger than anyone in publishing believes and more devoted than anyone in media understands.

A good book will keep you up past your bedtime, and at our age, that is saying something.