An Occurrence at Barter Books

So we're knocking around England's Lake District last week and it is, of course, raining, it being England. In Kendal, where there is not much to do, particularly when it's raining, we shelter in an Ottakar bookstore (but the sovereign in the Tintin adventure is King Ottokar, go figure), and I pick up Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, not because I don't already have several hundred books and magazines to read, including a half-dozen I've brought along on the trip, but because buying books makes me feel good, at least until I remember I have several hundred books and magazines I haven't yet read. It's the new edition from Bloomsbury, with drawings by Ralph Steadman.

I'm not sure I've read Bierce before, but I'd certainly heard the name. He disappeared without a trace in 1913 on his way to cover the Mexican Revolution and was never heard from again. Bierce, Judge Crater and Amelia Earheart figured in a lot of tales about alien abductions. The introduction to Devil's Dictionary, by Angus Calder, piqued my interest in Bierce and his fiction (which owes something to Poe, but Bierce's language remains clever and sharp where Poe's, these days, can seem musty).

So, days later, we're in Anwick, in Barter Books, reportedly one of, if not the, best used bookstore in Britain. (Housed in a former railroad station, it certainly must be one of the best looking.) I walk inside, and am struck by a display of wee books, orange bindings facing out. Turns out they're Penguin 60-shilling editions. Released to coincide with the publisher's 60th anniversary, they're about half the area of a trade paperback and run less than a hundred pages.

I reach onto the shelf of about 40 of the things and pull out ... An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce.

Devil's Dictionary doesn't have an entry for coincidence but I like the one for accident: "An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws."