An order has come in from China. Someone in China is looking for an old book.
“Oh Edward, did you have energy left to hunt for one?” says Natalie Hughes.
“What was it?” her husband says, rising from his chair.
“I don’t remember,” Natalie says. “Let me look.”
She squints at her computer, which is running slow.
“Come on, machine, wake up.”
The title is “A Descriptive and Illustrative Catalogue of Chinese Bronzes Acquired During the Administration of John Ellerton Lodge.” Brown cloth with gilt titling. It is somewhere among the 30,000 volumes in the Bookhouse, which is exactly what it sounds like: a 100-year-old house collared by ivy and packed with antiquated books, hidden on a side street off Wilson Boulevard in a strip-malled stretch of Arlington.
Edward, 91, heads to the stairs.
“They’re never where they should be,” says Natalie, 80, watching him begin the hunt. “Although sometimes they’re exactly where they should be.”
***
This is not a story about how books are good and the Internet is evil, nor is it about how modernity has vanquished antiquity and, therefore, doomed posterity.
Although.
The Bookhouse feels like a safe house. It announces itself, barely, with tiny lettering on the front porch. It is for stumbling upon, a anachronism in a universe ordered by Google at a time when life is completely searchable and the exhaustive hunt for a vellum-jacketed gem has been reduced to a simple tap on a touch screen.
Which is a good thing, the Hugheses say. The buyer from China easily found the book this way.
But he still wants the actual book in his hands, and now Edward is actually upstairs looking for it, passing his actual fingers over actual shelves of frayed spines.
Natalie sits at the counter, at rest, bunkered by stacks of books.
Rain taps on the roof. The air smells musty.
No customers walk in the door.
***
Natalie was born in the Philippines into a military family and lived on a series of air bases growing up. The itinerant lifestyle forbade the accumulation of possessions. This may be why she made a life out of acquiring and amassing books, she thinks.
In 1968, on a whim, she bought 3,000 books for $40 at a hotel liquidation in Bar Harbor, Maine, intending only to read them. Then she bought “Gold in Your Attic,” a guide to collecting books.
She was behind the counter in her first shop two years later.
Edward retired from the Transportation Department in 1973 and decided that he would raise broadleaf evergreens as a hobby. Natalie had a robust collection of botany books at her bookstore, in a new location on Irving Street in Arlington. They met as customer and shopkeeper.
“I liked him,” she says. “I would find books he was looking for, and I would use that excuse to call him at home to see if a woman ever answered. None ever did.”
Their first date was a hike in Turkey Run to see the ferns. They were married within a year. Edward got hooked on the book business. He and Natalie moved the operation to the Bookhouse on Emerson Street in 1975. The Washington region is a prime spot for book dealers, Edward says, because aging military officers would rather sell or donate their ephemera than pay to ship it to their retirement destinations.
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