By Beth McCoy
In graduate school, my peers and I frequented used book sales. Church basements and school cafeterias displayed row after row of fusty paperbacks that we thumbed through, tossed aside, and picked out like green beans in a market bin.
It was the early 1990s. The books we bought hailed from decades past and bore covers reflecting appropriate historical hues: turquoises for the 50s, reds for the 60s, avocados for the 70s. The musty, dusty novels, tracts, and treatises made many of us sneeze. We stacked them in wobbly towers on the checkout table as the attendant toted them up, 10 and 20 cents at a time.
Leaving these sales felt like victory, as if the mere buying of works by William Makepeace Thackeray, Allen Tate, or Baldesar Castiglione would make us smarter and more likely to pass our anything-goes, your specialty-be-damned qualifying exams.
We also ransacked the local used-book store, one that would allow you to return for credit the unread (because of the sneezing) Thackeray and leave with volumes whose own allergy-provoking qualities you tried to ignore.
And, of course, there was also the local thrift shop. On its shelves were entire personal libraries, complete with bookplates: silent memorials to readers past and perhaps passed. There were old household repair manuals as well as outdated survival guides that counseled tactical window opening in case of tornado.
And in that particular store, every time I went, there was always The Cuppi (1979). Rather, there were three copies of The Cuppi, all with a bright yellow-and-black jacket heralding the neon 1980s. I removed no copies of The Cuppi from a shelf. I was familiar only with their spines. Someone must have opened The Cuppi copies, for their location on the shelves changed with each visit.
The Cuppi haunted me: its bumblebee aesthetic buzzed in my peripheral vision. Still, I’d leave that store with suit jackets, earrings, and Corningware--but never with a Cuppi.
When I moved cross-country, I figured I had left The Cuppi behind. But there it was in a Wichita thrift store. During MLA conventions, I’d find it on a shelf in Adams Morgan or peeking from behind a bookstore cat in Philadelphia. When I moved to Rochester, I spotted the black-and-yellow lodged amid the Readers’ Digest Condensed Books at a VOA.
In thinking about this piece, I finally thought to look up The Cuppi on the internet. Used copies are still available. I saw the front cover, read about the plot and what the title means. And I learned about author Sandy Johnson: behind the yellowjacket spine where I had stopped for so long were, at the very least, words from a writer and from a life.