SPECIAL EDITION
Bay Area Readers on Their Most Treasured Books
Stephen Sparks is the co-owner of Point Reyes Books.
I was 22 when I first read “Moby-Dick,” just out of college and working at a boardwalk bookstore at the Jersey shore. My apartment, on the third floor of a carnation-pink Victorian, one of the few 19th century buildings still standing on the island, looked out over an amusement park. A Ferris wheel kept time late into the night. The sea was two blocks away; the humidity curled the covers of any book left exposed.
I was as ambitious in my reading that summer as I was unambitious in everything else. Inspired by Joe, a retired English teacher who moonlighted as a bookseller, I ordered a copy of the Penguin Classics edition. (The bookstore I worked at not being the kind of place one would find great literature.) I read at the beach, I read on my lunch breaks, I read on the clock, I read late into the night. Joe and I then drank beer at the local dive and talked the book through while keeping an eye on the ballgame. He’d read it a dozen times already and tossed a life vest in my direction during Melville’s more turbulent passages. The book was everything I wanted it to be, as much for the friendship it occasioned as for its obvious and lasting power. I’ve read it three times since, the last during a feverish 26-hour marathon I helped organize at Fort Mason.
Despite obtaining more lavish, handsome and more expensive copies of “Moby-Dick” over the years, I keep returning to this battered paperback, with its personal geology of notes, underlining, its accumulation of sediment and bookmarks, its rich patina of time and space.