Almost forgot to write again today. I wrote this a week or so ago and didn't post it -- no idea why -- but here it is:
I've been re-arranging my books. I wrote something not long ago about how I've got my space set up now so that I have near me many of the books I have always loved; acquiring them has become something of a hobby. I've also been thinking about what it might have been, somewhere in the mists of time, that led me to this. It is not because I am a librarian, and I didn't become a librarian because I loved books. I became a librarian originally because I wanted to tell stories to children. It didn't work out that way, and that's okay, but that was my motivation back in 1974.
Ten years ago or more, I started collecting little books.
This shelf is in my bedroom, above my nightstand. I had already had one or two, most notably The Nutshell Library, as I've always been a big Maurice Sendak fan, but it was around then that I got the little shelves and started collecting these in earnest. And my purpose was a simple one: I thought that someday, I could be a cool Grandma, a Grandma with a shelf of tiny books that my grandchildren would look over and pick up at random. I would read them stories from the little books. Remember, my own children were 13 and 10, and I was thinking about little books for grandchildren. My kids had always been surrounded by picture books, literally since birth. I love the feeling of being surrounded by books and picking them up at random to get lost in.
I had no picture books as a child, except for a few Golden Books. I had the flu when I was four, and was very sick for a week or so, and all the neighbors gave me Golden Books to keep me occupied in bed, and those were my books. My parents had bought a few more, and that was it. But my parents had, at different times, belonged to various book-of-the-month clubs, and so the hardcover books in our house consisted of several volumes of Norman Mailer and Thomas Wolfe, and a few classic-type, hardcover children's books.
These were not books I could pick up and read. They were intimidating. The pictures in the Hans Christian Andersen book were terrifying; I had nightmares about them, and cannot stand Andersen's stories to this day.
When I was about six, my Aunt Rose, who had married late in life, moved into her own home. It was -- and still is, I imagine -- a bungalow style house in the small Massachusetts town where she and my father grew up. The neat little brown house enchanted me, so much so, in fact, that once, when they had a new cement walk put into the backyard, Uncle Ben let me put my initials in it with a stick. It was my claim on the house, I always said.
There were three bedrooms upstairs; the smallest one of them was where my sister and I slept when we visited several times a year. It was an L-shaped room with low, sloped ceilings, almost like an attic room. There was very little in it: one bed (I always slept on a folding cot when we were there), a nightstand, a set of five bookshelves, all filled with books. Aunt Rose was a teacher.
My cot was always in the part of the room next to the bookshelves. At night, when my sister wouldn't turn out the light because it was too early for her to go sleep, I would reach over and pull out a book. I had two favorites. One, believe it or not, was Heredity and You, by Amram Scheinfeld. It had been a college text of Aunt Rose's, and was long out of print by the time I read it when I was eleven or twelve, but I read the whole thing many times, and I loved it.
The other was 50 Famous Stories Retold. I don't know how many times I read it. It changed my life. It had been an elementary school reader in the 20's when Aunt Rose started teaching -- it has a school stamp inside the cover and an original copyright date of 1896 -- and had long been removed from the curriculum; she had brought this one copy home. I think she must have loved it, too. It was my greatest joy when visiting there to lie on my cot at night and reach out a hand and pull this book off the shelf, turning its smooth clay-coated pages and reading all these traditional stories. I didn't ask to take it home because I loved having it there to read when we visited. But one day Aunt Rose realized how much I loved it -- maybe she said she was going to throw it out and I had a 12 year old's stroke -- and it became mine forever.
Some of the stories in the book are
- King Alfred and the Cakes - the first of a dozen stories about brave English kings and princes
- The Story of William Tell
- The Sword of Damocles
- The Blind Men and the Elephant
- Whittington and His Cat
- The Story of Robin Hood
There is something simply amazing about randomly and without forethought, almost reflexively, reaching out your hand to a bookshelf and picking up ... anything. It is an unbelievable and not-to-be-taken-for-granted luxury and privelege. And it reminds me of a quotation by Anne Herbert from The Whole Earth Catalog, 1980:
Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.
--------------------------------------------------
I'm watching some cheesy clip show
--------------------------------------------------
last ::
next
Sweet Sorrow - 06.12.2007
So ... - 12.19.2006
Christmastime Is Near - 12.18.2006
Fifteen Years - 12.17.2006
A Message From Our Sponsor - 12.16.2006
|
