BIRDS AND OPEN AIR

Just as it started to rain yesterday I reached the stairs leading down to the large carved and slightly scuffed black wooden door of Open Air Books at 25 Toronto Street. There's a banner naming the shop tied to the railing but no sign or nameplate on the door, and I always hesitate in front of that door, wondering if it's alright just to walk in. To open it is to begin an adventure, it gives entry into a sous-terre treasure house of books and maps, shelves of books, boxes of books, stacks of books, stacks of boxes of books, extending I've no idea how far, really, since I always advance to the desk--no one behind it yesterday--then turn right to the section where a small wooden sign perched on top of a row of books states: BIRDS.

Yesterday I insinuated myself among the boxes and stacks and stared up at shelf after shelf of books to do with birds--large illustrated coffee table books, small regional guides, books for beginning birdwatchers, technical lists--and tried to remember what the organizing principle was. I was on the hunt for a Princeton Field Guide published some time last year: Mark Brazil's Birds of East Asia: China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Russia (I do like to see that serial comma). It's hard for any principle to keep up with the on-going accumulation that is Open Air Books, but I could glimpse a geography to the shelves and chose an area to focus on, two shelveswhere the book seemed most likely to be, if it was there at all. Both were double-shelved, and there were books piled below them to a height of about 2 feet blocking the lower shelves.

I pawed through the front row of books on the first shelf, then carefully shifted them in bunches to I could see what stood behind, and there it was--Birds of East Asia with its sleek black cover from which a Stellar's sea eagle clutching an unhappy fish stared directly at me. And so I bought it and carried it home, plastic-wrapped, in my Different Drummer bookbag.

This morning I find Peter has borrowed two bird books from the Gerstein LIbrary at University of Toronto, one dealing with Korea, the other with Japan. The colours in the Korean one seem faded, and the Japanese one is hard-covered and awkwardly large. So we'll take our own shiny Princeton field guide and return the others to the library. Already, paging the books, I've discovered there are birds we might see that I saw in Tasmania: the white-bellied sea eagle, for one. And there are members of families I encountered in Tasmania, the cuckoo shrikes, for instance.