Today I needed to move two of my bookcases because I inconveniently parked them underneath the main water shutoff valve to my house. Downstream of that valve is the Pressure Relief Valve (Pressure Regulating Valve?) or PRV which will be replaced tomorrow. Books moved include the latter half of the alphabet for authors of fiction, plus poetry, essays, books about reading and language, literary quarterlies, literature anthologies, drama, and the stuff I call “books too big to fit anywhere else”. Moving these books renewed the love affair I have with them.
I cannot claim to have coined the word bibliophilia but my spell checker doesn’t like it. Obviously a primitive type of AI with all the words at its digital fingertips would sneer at such a word. I maintain it exists, nonetheless, and I further claim it describes a condition similar to addiction in that those afflicted with it do not recognize it as a malady. Rather they proudly lean into it right up to the moment it degrades their lives into sociopathy. I never had a lot going for me in the sociopathy-avoidance spectrum; it therefore has impacted my life little.
Though I read 99% of my books electronically now, I’ve developed no attachment to them the way I have to the physical ones. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have the history with them? No matter. I realized today what a wonderful paradigm for a series of posts! Forthwith:
I’ve carted around the above two dictionaries since 1978. They were ‘useless’ even then. The one on the bottom has a copyright of 1939 on it, with 14 more copyrights stretching back to 1903 on the reverse of the title page. In 1939 my mother was 10. This must have guided her through the end of elementary school and through high school. It undoubtedly felt the fingers of my grandfather paging through it as he sought a word for some of his reports and letters. He would have been in his 40’s at the time.
As with the bottom dictionary, the one on top reminds me of a relative also. When my mother was in her early teens around 1941-1943, her Uncle Dennis came to live with his half-sister (my grandmother) and her small family. He needed to establish residency in Washington State because he planned to attend the University of Washington. I’m not sure if he worked for a year or attended high school. This dictionary is copyrighted 1942, and its title I feel reflects his academic bent. (He went to work in an athletic supply store in Seattle after graduation, eventually bought it with one or two partners, and had a very comfortable life financially. The store was called Athletic Supply.)
All my childhood I stared at these dictionaries and pulled them out again and again, every time we visited my grandparents. I’m pretty sure where my brother and I slept is where my great-uncle lived for that year. Upon graduation I guess he figured he didn’t need the dictionary anymore. My grandfather had finished off the basement in gorgeous tongue-and-groove pine boards, and he built in next to his desk the bookcase which held these two volumes.
As I may have detailed before, I purged about 400 books from our library in 2020, primarily so I could use some of the shelves to display family memorabilia. Books I felt held no special tug on my heart joined those I felt wouldn’t be read again nor would they need to be consulted. It represented a Marie Kondo approach: if the book brought joy, it almost always stayed on the shelf. The rest were boxed up and shoved in a closet. One doesn’t just throw away books unless they’re an ignorant cretin which means they likely don’t own books in the first place. (Although there was that mother/daughter pair I saw once at a giant book sale who were buying a shopping cart full of books based on how they looked! Books as interior design elements! Horrific to think such people exist.) I’ve since found an outlet in a used bookstore/coffee shop/beer & wine cafe which gives me credit for the books I drop off. Imagine that! I drop off a half dozen hardbacks, and I get to buy three pints on half-price Wednesday!
Though 400 went to live in the closet, an even 1100 remain. I can’t believe that when I look at the shelves, but that’s what my library cataloging program says. Today, just pulling down about seven shelves of books inspired such joy and memories. There are the literary quarterlies I got from Eastern Washington University while teaching English. And there are the half dozen volumes of varying size I needed to buy for my Medieval Literature class. Oh look, there’s the best book I ever read on the slipperiness of translations (Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language by Douglas R Hofstadter who previously had won the Pulitzer Prize for Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid). Oh, my college literature texts! The glorious translation of Anna Karenina purchased on the first family vacation I organized just a couple years before my father died. And look there, the slim volume of fairy tales my parents and grandparents read to me when I and my brother were quite young.
Some of it is snob appeal. I make no apologies for that. If you can’t be proud of yourself for having read a goodly collection of great literature, if you think it a waste of your time, then I ask, why did you waste it? Didn’t you have something better to do? Like, I don’t know, trade it for a differently colored book which matches your decor better?
In the weeks ahead I’ll focus on particular books which spark that wonderful joy of reading…like the books about reading itself!
all the voices in my head 