The Good Book

Loome himself holds a doctorate in Philosophical Theology from the University of Tübingen, Germany. The combination of being a European-trained theologian and a self-described "hard-nosed Catholic" is part of the reason he has been able to establish himself as the foremost bookseller in his field. Most of what he knows, he says, is "absolute trivia. But I also know--and [this] is a great benefit to my customers--why Lutherans are not Catholics, and why Catholics are not Methodists."

"A bad book is just information," he continues later. "It's a dead end. A good book will lead you to more books, and they will lead you to others." He explains this while expounding on Platonism, and the way the store embodies this philosophy. "Information is easy. From information, we gather opinions, and they can be either true or not. The store is here to provide people a way to rise above those opinions to knowledge, and, from there, to wisdom, which is much better than knowledge. There are two ways to think about wisdom. Wisdom, you could say, is another name for God. Or, wisdom is when you know things that are eternal, or always true."

One of the ideas that Loome holds to be always true is the sanctity of human life-- "WITHOUT EXCEPTION," he says loudly, repeating the phrase a few times for good measure. And should you fail to infer what he is talking about, he states that he is "unapologetically pro-life and anti-death-penalty." At a medieval conference in Minneapolis a few years ago, Loome recalls, he saw Noam Chomsky speak. During the question-and-answer session, a student asked Chomsky what he thought of the abortion question. According to Loome, Chomsky replied, "'I am afraid that people in the future will look back on us and say that we lived in an age of barbarism.'"

Loome revels in this story, and I think it's because he sees himself--a pro-life, Catholic intellectual--as a marginalized figure. Surprised that anyone was interested in writing a story about him and his store, Loome insists that he's "more countercultural than anything the City Pages can come up with."

Loome's countercultural enterprise is to preserve books from the second millennium for the third one. And in an age when print material as utilitarian as the newspaper is said to be flirting with obsolescence, the very notion of theological books can seem downright medieval. Yet the volumes in the Loome, with the exception of the Bible, will probably never exist electronically. Nor will there ever be a full computer inventory of such collected knowledge. There are too many titles, and too few readers, and practically no money in it, and the transfer process would take too long to ever attempt. And so for a small, self-select group, the physical presence of the Loome remains a necessity.

Say, for example, you are a Medieval Literature professor from Vienna. After throwing a few million euros at a new computer-science center, your university decides to beef up its theology holdings with a thousand-odd volumes. You may venture a flight to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where someone from Loome Theological Booksellers will pick you up, drive you to Stillwater, and deposit you at the nearby Lowell Inn, where they have thoughtfully arranged for your lodging. If you request, they will set up Internet access for you in the back of the store, and will invite you to wander the shelves all night, by yourself, after close, trusting you'll shut off the lights and lock the door behind you.

Although my own more modest purchases have yet to win me this treatment, on a recent visit I decided to pretend I was just such a professor, conducting a brief walk-through to survey the breadth of the collection.

The first title I come upon is that Summa Theologica I so lustily sniffed when I first walked into the store. It never ceases to amaze me that some books are bound in the skin of animals--in this case, cow. The cover is red leather, with marble boards and a ridged, curved spine. Inscription: "Edward Fitzgerald, Prize for argumentation at the Grand Seminary, May 19, 1915." This is volumen primum, the first of six volumes, published by Forzani et Sodalis, officinatores librarii, Romae. One-sixth of God's total net wisdom costs a mere $150.