My first year in Houston I lived more or less in the Museum District, which put me within walking distance of at least four organizations that regularly exhibited photographs. There was also a branch of Half Price Books, a big-box used book buy-and-sell operation. I often walked over to check out their photography section, hopeful that some curator emeritus, discouraged by the direction of whatever local institution, had given up and unloaded a pallet of scarce old photobooks at the shop’s doorstep. I checked earlier today.

Photography is one shelf over from art, and shares a cramped, dead-end aisle with architecture. It is this way at every Half Price Books I have ever visited. I breezed past the endcaps, which always overflowed with remaindered copies of Hollywood portrait books and lists of art to see before dying, heavy things destined to be pulped. In the aisle, sitting in a chair in the corner, was an old man. He was hunched over a large book that contained pictures of houses. Where did he get the chair? He was wearing a blue cap, faded denim shirt, old jeans and running shoes. Head to ankles blue, with a white beard tumbling halfway down his chest in tight curls. I could hear him breathing. He exchanged the house book for another very large volume, this one of portraits. I pretended he was some noteworthy artist from a previous generation, maybe somebody whose silver prints were in the collection of the Museum or whose monograph was right here in front of us. The shelf above his head was half Ansel Adams and half Diane Arbus, including six copies of two different versions of her biography. I was nervous to disturb the man, to stand too close. I studied his Wayfarer sunglasses, which were resting on the shelf atop a row of squatty Lee Friedlander books. He obstructed my view of photographers last name G-J. That was fine. The second half of the alphabet was satisfactory.

Eadweard Muybridge was misshelved in two different places.

Instead of focusing on titles or artists, which seemed to be mostly 20th century American, I glazed over and thought about the scale of the books. They were nearly all humongous. Why has the photobook so often commingled with the coffee table book? The idea is probably that it allows the picture to be larger on the page, but I question the value in that. So many photographs have led beautiful lives inside wallets. I always wish for more book-sized books. Pictures are less demanding, yet more confident, when they are easier to hold. Readers can drift through the work as if absorbing a chapbook without being made to feel they are in church.

There is also the fact that I am at a stage of my life when I move too often. Boxes of books are heavy. I keep this one gigantic cardboard box around in order to transport the largest photobook I own, Peter Fraser’s eponymous thing, a square maroon one with a paper airplane on the cover. Unfortunately I really like the book, so I keep moving it. The box came from Target and originally carried bedsheets through the mail. Since it is the only box I have that fits the Peter Fraser, I wrote BOOKS on the side with a sharpie and I fill it to the brim with books every time I move. It becomes heavy. Meanwhile Ruth Van Beek’s The Levitators is essentially a steno pad, and it is brilliant. Plus I can slot it right alongside my science fiction paperbacks. What I am saying is artists and designer should, can sometimes, be considerate when dealing with good photographs.

The Half Price Books had no Peter Fraser or Ruth Van Beek. It might never. In fact, nothing at all leapt out from the blur of titles. I glanced at the bottom shelf, the one for especially oversized books, and inhaled. As I walked out of the aisle, the bearded man continued to flip through books. Horst. He seemed remarkably content.