Judging Books By Their Covers

I’m taking an online ecology class. It’s in preparation for forestry school and to make up for my minimal science background. There are ten lessons that I read, with short homework assignments based on the reading and a quiz every few lessons. It’s fairly basic, but I’m learning a lot and enjoying it. What I lack, however, is a good text or reference book, in particular on the local ecology and flora of Patagonia. My search for good supplemental material has made me realize how precious books are here and, I imagine, in many parts of the world.

My search has taken me on a tour of seven bookstores in Punta Arenas. Each is small in area and intimate, in the sense that I am never more than 5 or 6 feet from the store-owner at any given moment. Oftentimes, the owner is chatting or sipping mate with a friend, and the close quarters make me feel as if I have barged into someone’s living room, as conversation is suspended when I enter and all eyes follow me as I walk around, acutely aware of each creak of the floorboard or rustle of my parka as I lean forward to pick up a book. Sometimes the clerk follows around a few feet behind me, at times under the guise of dusting the spotless shelves. It all makes me feel very self-conscious and tense. All of the other customers who enter request a specific book and leave promptly. I seem to be the only one browsing.

Handwritten signs indicate each approximate section, which contain a random selection and assortment of books. A children’s book sandwiched between a used English-language college textbook on hydrology and a cookbook on Chilean asados (barbeques), for example. Casual browsing is made difficult by the fact that many—particularly the new or newer ones—have been diligently wrapped by hand in clear plastic wrap. This, along with the fact that books published in South America don’t tend to have summaries or reviews on the back cover, compels me to judge from the frontcover alone whether the book looks interesting enough to trouble the clerk to unwrap for me to peruse. It seems like a lot of effort to ask someone to undertake for something that I might not ultimately purchase. Also, once the clerk unwraps the book and hands it over for my review, he or she stands there expectantly, awaiting my decision. I feel an uncomfortable combination of guilt and pressure. It’s such a change from browsing in the U.S., where I can spend hours leafing through books in relative solitude.

The high price of books is also a surprise. I had wanted to buy the Spanish version of Isabel Allende’s latest book (My Invented Country), a paperback that retails at $12.95 in the U.S. and in Chile over $20. The one Ecology textbook that I was able to find (in Spanish) which was, in the words of the storeowner “very cheap”, was over $100. An alternative is to buy laminated posters and information sheets that focus on a specific field such as anatomy, chemistry, or the water cycle. Every bookstore seems to have a large selection of these, and in a place where information is at a premium, it is more affordable to accumulate information a little at a time. Copy centers are often busy with long lines of people photocopying entire books; apparently copyrights are no obstacle.

I emerge with a book that details the tree species of southern Chile. The book is beautiful, with hand-drawn images of the leaf structure and seeds of each tree, along with cross-sections of the trunk and detailed explanations of common uses for each species. It’s a work of art. And the whole book search experience has left me with a heightened appreciation for the extreme care with which storeowners treat their books. It is not an exaggeration to say that I treasure my book. Part of me is even half-inclined to wrap it back up in plastic wrap.