Alvin P. Cohen

Notes on a Chinese Workingclass Bookshelf

SOMETIME DURING THE LATE 1950s, the Sacramento California, Chinatown, a very old and decrepit section of the city standing on low-lying flood-prone land, was demolished and buried. On top of this new fill, a new modernistic Chinatown was constructed. In 1970, two amateur archeologists and old-bottle hunters found their way into the tunnels remaining in the underground ruins and discovered a pile of abandoned books and papers in the remains of what had previously been a well known and thriving Chinese restaurant. They gathered up the entire lot and brought the materials to me.1 These books2 are apparently the remnants of a leisure-time reading collection belonging to someone who worked in the restaurant, i.e., someone of workingclass status and education. There is no way of knowing if this is the total collection or merely the discards remaining after the removal of more valuable books (some of the multi-volume sets are incomplete and some volumes are mutilated). Even so, some observations can be made about the collection but always with the reservation that we may possibly only have a portion of the full bookshelf.