“My father always told me — Never trust anyone whose TV is bigger than their bookshelf” said Emilia Clarke, who is famed as Daenerys from the popular TV series The Game of Thrones.
Excellent Ruth and Peco. A home library is such an important resource. I have an extensive collection of nature field guides which I love looking through and marvelling at the contents of. There are species I would never have heard of if it wasn't for these books, and the ability to identify obscure dragonflies, moths, birds, and flowers that I see is invaluable (this information is really hard to access on the internet for some species groups).
Reading information in books also adds worth/value to that knowledge. When my father was young, if he wanted to find out something about Japanese history, he would have to cycle to the local library, find the book, find the part he wanted to read, and then take notes. You can be sure he valued and treasured such knowledge considering how much effort it took him to obtain. And the memory of the process of obtaining the information helped him remember the information he gleaned.
Conversely, we live in a world of inform action overload - cheap, easy to access information that we often forget the same day that we read it. I know this experience all too well in my own life. I am much more likely to remember something I read on a paper page than on a screen.
I fully agree that working to obtain your knowledge makes it much more memorable. Even the act of removing the book from the shelf and locating a specific page provides an anchor for retrieval that is absent from online searches. I have received a whole "re-education" through teaching our children and enjoy visual encyclopedias almost as much as they do:)
That last part is quite true. I've been going slowly through a copy of a church history book recently (still in the first few hundred years!), and the retention and connection to other things I've been reading has been that much better because of it.
Yes retention definitely is much better from physical texts. Our daughter felt quite frustrated that most her university courses use online texts that are much harder to interact with than a hardcopy. She thus prints out course slides (and bought additional hard copies) to be able to write accompanying notes by hand.
I'm a published novelist, and recently I had a conversation with three separate (as yet unpublished) writers finishing up their first novels and really struggling. I asked them how many books they read a month. All three hadn't read a novel yet this year. I admit to losing my cool and saying it's lunacy to expect to produce a high quality, publishable novel, without reading widely and nigh compulsively.
I don't know if it's arrogance or laziness or just the result of the things you often write about: a brain consumed my 'the machine.'
The idea that novelists are trying to write novels without regularly reading them is astonishing. Much of what I’ve learned as a novelist has been absorbed, both explicitly and in many implicit ways, through continuous reading. My world would feel far emptier without novels!
You are so right about the language used in old children's books. As I wrote in my own newsletter (https://terryfreedman.substack.com/i/142908904/just-william) I recently picked up some copies of books I used to enjoy as a child, and I was struck by how adult the language is: words like histrionics, Pegasean, and many others. I cannot imagine that sort of linguistic richness appearing in modern children's books.
In my opinion, another reason for acquiring older editions of books, and physical ones rather than digital ones (I'm thinking of KIndle) is that they are less likely to have been bowdlerised because of someone's view that the book needs updating for the 21st century.
Thanks for linking your post Terry! I had never heard of the Just William series before and will keep my eyes open for Richmal Crompton now:) A few months ago I was reading "Lad: A Dog" by Albert Payson Terhune with our youngest son and was struck by the complexity of the sentence structure and vocabulary. The words 'brazenly, choicest bone, vagaries, idolized, disinterested, gallantly, stark adoration' all appear on the second page of the book and I can also not imagine them making an appearance in modern books.
I hadn't heard of that book, but it sounds wonderful. I think there's a lot of dumbing down and patronising when it comes to children's reading. I read an article recently in which the writer said we should give kids action stories to read, because if you make them read Emma they'll want to take up glue-sniffing as soon as they get to the first comma , which is funny but, in my opinion, wrong. I suspect you know of the Classics Illustrated series. I wrote about the Emma quote, Classics Illustrated and my experience at 14 in school here (sorry to link to one of my own posts again but hopefully you'll enjoy it). https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/letter-to-rebecca-24-07 Incidentally, I came across your newsletter via Miller's Book Review.
Haha, I doubt that it would cause glue-sniffing, it might cause knitting though...Our youngest son (almost 12) asked me to show him again how to knit, and we ended up knitting together while listening to an audiobook of The Count of Monte Cristo which he found highly engaging:)
Building your book monastery -- what a beautiful way to look at your home library. Unplug from machines, retreat to your monastery, feed your soul. Thanks for this thoughtful post, Ruth and Peco.
Marvellous. I have the same paperback edition of Lord of the Rings as pictured here. I have scheduled a read of volume 3 after Easter. I bought the full set of CS Lewis' Narnia stories after Christmas. I hadn't read them since my early teens (which was, shall we say, quite some time ago) and thoroughly enjoyed them. My mother has now borrowed them to read herself! Some books, like Tolkien, you can read again and again. Others I get bored with. I loved Jane Austen but haven't wanted to read them in years. Maybe one day. I, too, have a passion for old books and love the inscriptions. I wish you well with your rescue efforts!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and encouragement:) I have to admit that I would rather re-read Austen than Tolkien, but always love revisiting the Narnia stories. Yes the inscriptions in old books are always a pleasant discovery. The 1854 dictionary illustrated here was apparently a gift "from Aunt Margret Kierstead to her nephew Kenneth E. Todd" in 1935. It must already have counted as an antique back then and I am curious how it found its way to the floor of the used bookstore where I found it...
Yes, the stories books could tell! I recently got a French copy of Dom Gueranger's Liturgical Year from an English bookseller. It has the stamp of the Abbey of Ste Cecile de Solesmes inside, so it must have travelled with them to exile in England in 1903 or thereabouts. Why didn't it go back to France with them? How did it leave their library and where did it go? Books are so interesting!
I read both of those books over the past year, and loved them. The Road was really moving in the end, and chilling at times, and Canticle more cerebral, but they are both high on my list of favorites. (Not that I would wish either future to come to pass!)
Peco- I think A Canticle is a very good novel but an absolutely great book. Come to think of it, it might be just about time to read it again. Yes, The Road is truly beautiful. I read it as 'objectively ambiguous'--particularly the ending. I think McCarthy forces us to decide whether there is hope. And hope in what? What I have sometimes called Dark Hope.
I hope all is well in the Pecosian household. -Jack
I think the Road’s ending – a final little section that is nature-focused – bears striking resemblance to some of the nature-focused transitional sections in Canticle. I don’t know if it was chance or just two great creative minds thinking the same way.
Jack - so nice to hear from you! Peco gave me the book as a birthday present and I was immensely taken with the idea of booklegging. The Road is also a striking read, although much more terrifying. Hope you are well :)
Ruth- Excellent choice on books! I have been haunted by A Canticle for Leibowitz for at least 15 years. Which might explain a thing or two about how I think about things. I don't listen to many audiobooks but the one for A Canticle is excellent. Well worth the time, if you have the chance. As is the audiobook for The Road.
Jack, Peco, Ruth et al - pressed for time because blessed with family visiting, but Canticle for Liebowitz - read it mid-1960s - got it down last night and skimmed. Where 'bookleggers'?
'Memorabilia' and the legend of the martyrdom of the Saint Founder of the Order, yes, but 'reality' of the survival of the key revival texts of math and physics was a nuclear bomb shelter walled in by the blast that killed them ('Emily's tooth') and the civilisation? Can't find my copy of Farenheit 451, (Ray Bradbury), which I remember as explicitly 'bootleggers', but old man's memory!
PS Just a thought, I tend to think of poetry as 'the DNA' of cultural transmission via words, and maths similarly (as in the Canticle) as the DNA of modern physical science. Both can reappear from refugia and live again starting in a few, even in one individual mind?
PPS JM Greer the Druid attempted to revive / promote the treasured book store a dozen years ago, a touch naively in retrospect, but worth a mention. If Paul Kingsnorth is an example for us English / Brits, then visiting small pre-reformation churches in particular is implicate education. He is reproducing this experience at Holy Wells in Ireland this while.
Thanks for adding your thoughts Philip - particularly "DNA of cultural transmission'. If you are looking for the specific reference for bootleggers, it's on pg.63 in my copy where there is s flashback to Isaac Edward Leibowitz's founding of a new community to, "preserve human history for the great-great-great-grandchildren of the children of the simpletons who wanted it destroyed...It's members were either 'bookleggers' or 'memorizers', according to the tasks assigned. The bookleggers sumuggled books to the southwest desert and buried them there in kegs."
Thanks Ruth, got it p53 my copy. Quaint stuff elderly memory. Goodness, Nate Hagens calls his educational non-fictional project The Great Simplification presumably conscious of the fictional tradition. Guess he is looking for the cultural DNA among us!
Don't want to labour this but taking in Canticle for Liebowitz again has been an odd experience. It seemed immensely sad, especially, somehow, the theology. This was America and the null answer. The themes have bobbed up again recently (Hagens is quoting 'bright flashes'). 70 years on of course fall-out like Chernobyl has not caused anything like that scale of mutation and selection. And these days there would be no 2nd round of industrial civilisation; the 2nd half of energy and material sources we are left with are too hard to get. We did not know it then but there will be no spaceships even if there was somewhere to go.
I felt that the second part and especially the ending of the book offered a bleak and dismal future (and yes, with sad and hopeless theology). The part of the book that resonated with me was the first section, especially the role bookleggers and memorizers, which can serve valuable roles. Peco's novel "Exogenesis" offered a much more plausible, possible, and ultimately hopeful future.
I've found some amazing totally forgotten classics from the Pulitzer Prize Fiction Winners from the 1920's and 1930's. In the book "Laughing Boy," I learned about Navajo's assimilation into European Settler culture in the 1920's as their own culture vanishes. Given it was written so long ago, it seemed pretty authentic. The book "So Big" taught me about farming on the plains and the introduction of asparagus to the American diet through a story about a mother/son relationship. Nobody talks about these books but they're real gems - written with much thought, back when people used a richer language than we use today. Many are out of print but available on thriftbooks for cheap, or through inter-library loan.
We live in a Golden Age of book collecting, due to reasons like libraries getting rid of wonderful books to make room for the new, as well as the plethora of garage/estate sales where books of all sorts are available for a song. It truly is a great time to be a book lover!
The only time I feel any pangs over owning so many books is when we move. (We are currently in the process of moving.) So when we've packed countless boxes of books and they stack in towers everywhere, I wonder if we're a bit mad. My husband and I do cull our collection a bit here and there, removing books that no longer serve our family, but inevitably purchase more every year.
Yes moving with books is definitely not easy. When we moved four years ago, it felt like the majority was just bookshelves and boxes of books:) All the best with your move!
My books represent worlds off thought and imagination. I group books by the conversation that they are having with each other, in which I can join simply by seeing them. When I use my own mind, I place thoughts and questions and referents upon shelves, ready to take them down any time their participation would add to the work that I do. When a book sits beside another, they are speaking. So I have near to each other Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi, Avicenna, and then Tolkien and Beagle! ... Or also, Galeano, Kapuscinski, Nasdiij, and Arundhati Roy. Every day that my dear friends lay in boxes in my basement, I long for them, their good company, their spring of inspiration that will turn my mundane microcosm into an infinitely sublime chance to play simultaneously about the firmament.
Once as a new student I lost my way, entered the wrong courtyard, and then further, the wrong room. Upon seeing an attractive shelf of books, I began to read their spines, growing in excitement, before I realized that I had intruded upon the privacy of some delightful person unknown. Ashamed to be possibly found in this private sanctuary without invitation, I shook off the enchantment and fled, hoping not to be noticed. Now, I mourn the loss of that possible friend, and wish that I had been found, even forced myself to be so discovered. Surely a common scholarly enthusiasm would have assured our bond to be inviolable by that brief social transgression. I mourn the loss of the friends I have not met. Even, as I passed through neighborhoods, I look at the windows and imagine what if I were to have a singular literary x-ray vision, to see the books on the shelves. Then they would become for me my friends, my mentors, those with whom I could come to New understandings of the world. Just only then would remain for me the knocking upon the door, and the hopeful opening. I love my friends from other centuries and times, but I grieve more the yet living friends upon whose doors I have not dared knock.
This is wonderful. I have been thinking lately of the value of incorporating well-made and beautiful books. We have many paperbacks that aren’t that appealing to the senses, but sometimes that’s what’s available or what one can afford. I think it was Autumn Kern who, in a video, explained how she buys well-made beautiful books on the cheap by frequenting estate, library, and school sales, etc, too. I personally have been using Thrift Books for a while and really appreciate the selection and affordability!
I have come across our most treasured books for free. My favourite "East of Eden" is a first edition and has a beautiful green cloth cover - the thrift store sold it for $3.99! Buying on the cheap is truly a pleasure (I actually just came home with "Roughing It" by Mark Twain which I found for $1.50 :)
Agreed! The most beautiful books tend to be old books (probably because books were more valued back then). I have a book from the 1700's at home. It is stunningly beautiful and well made - no wonder it has survived until now.
Then again, I also have a treasured collection of Christian paperbacks with hideous front covers (really really bad). It is a fun little collecting hobby of mine.
If civilization suddenly ended, and all our digital content vanished, future people exploring the remains of your home might assume the brightest people on earth lived in the 1700s.
Hello, used bookstore owner here! Our classics section is constantly diminished, not because we toss them out, but because people won't stop buying them, which I find massively encouraging in the face of all the bad news about declining literacy and books no longer being assigned in schools.
I've been keeping an eye on the growing list of comments on this post, and I just want to say how wonderful and endearing all of these comments are! There is nothing quite like a bunch of bookish people talking and reveling in the goodness of the printed word. It warms the heart!
Beautiful! Thank you so much for this lovely gift. I only skimmed it, but can see it’s a treasure. Must print out to read more carefully - can’t deal with having the screen in the way. And speaking of screens, it is very depressing to consider the fact that millions of people engage with the printed word on their cell phones. How diminished everything is through that conduit, apart from its harms.
"Never try to start an argument with a person whose TV is larger than his bookshelf." -anon
Ha, that is a splendid quote Roman!
“My father always told me — Never trust anyone whose TV is bigger than their bookshelf” said Emilia Clarke, who is famed as Daenerys from the popular TV series The Game of Thrones.
I BELIEVE! AMEN!
Excellent Ruth and Peco. A home library is such an important resource. I have an extensive collection of nature field guides which I love looking through and marvelling at the contents of. There are species I would never have heard of if it wasn't for these books, and the ability to identify obscure dragonflies, moths, birds, and flowers that I see is invaluable (this information is really hard to access on the internet for some species groups).
Reading information in books also adds worth/value to that knowledge. When my father was young, if he wanted to find out something about Japanese history, he would have to cycle to the local library, find the book, find the part he wanted to read, and then take notes. You can be sure he valued and treasured such knowledge considering how much effort it took him to obtain. And the memory of the process of obtaining the information helped him remember the information he gleaned.
Conversely, we live in a world of inform action overload - cheap, easy to access information that we often forget the same day that we read it. I know this experience all too well in my own life. I am much more likely to remember something I read on a paper page than on a screen.
I fully agree that working to obtain your knowledge makes it much more memorable. Even the act of removing the book from the shelf and locating a specific page provides an anchor for retrieval that is absent from online searches. I have received a whole "re-education" through teaching our children and enjoy visual encyclopedias almost as much as they do:)
That last part is quite true. I've been going slowly through a copy of a church history book recently (still in the first few hundred years!), and the retention and connection to other things I've been reading has been that much better because of it.
Yes retention definitely is much better from physical texts. Our daughter felt quite frustrated that most her university courses use online texts that are much harder to interact with than a hardcopy. She thus prints out course slides (and bought additional hard copies) to be able to write accompanying notes by hand.
I'm a published novelist, and recently I had a conversation with three separate (as yet unpublished) writers finishing up their first novels and really struggling. I asked them how many books they read a month. All three hadn't read a novel yet this year. I admit to losing my cool and saying it's lunacy to expect to produce a high quality, publishable novel, without reading widely and nigh compulsively.
I don't know if it's arrogance or laziness or just the result of the things you often write about: a brain consumed my 'the machine.'
The idea that novelists are trying to write novels without regularly reading them is astonishing. Much of what I’ve learned as a novelist has been absorbed, both explicitly and in many implicit ways, through continuous reading. My world would feel far emptier without novels!
You are so right about the language used in old children's books. As I wrote in my own newsletter (https://terryfreedman.substack.com/i/142908904/just-william) I recently picked up some copies of books I used to enjoy as a child, and I was struck by how adult the language is: words like histrionics, Pegasean, and many others. I cannot imagine that sort of linguistic richness appearing in modern children's books.
In my opinion, another reason for acquiring older editions of books, and physical ones rather than digital ones (I'm thinking of KIndle) is that they are less likely to have been bowdlerised because of someone's view that the book needs updating for the 21st century.
Thanks for linking your post Terry! I had never heard of the Just William series before and will keep my eyes open for Richmal Crompton now:) A few months ago I was reading "Lad: A Dog" by Albert Payson Terhune with our youngest son and was struck by the complexity of the sentence structure and vocabulary. The words 'brazenly, choicest bone, vagaries, idolized, disinterested, gallantly, stark adoration' all appear on the second page of the book and I can also not imagine them making an appearance in modern books.
I hadn't heard of that book, but it sounds wonderful. I think there's a lot of dumbing down and patronising when it comes to children's reading. I read an article recently in which the writer said we should give kids action stories to read, because if you make them read Emma they'll want to take up glue-sniffing as soon as they get to the first comma , which is funny but, in my opinion, wrong. I suspect you know of the Classics Illustrated series. I wrote about the Emma quote, Classics Illustrated and my experience at 14 in school here (sorry to link to one of my own posts again but hopefully you'll enjoy it). https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/letter-to-rebecca-24-07 Incidentally, I came across your newsletter via Miller's Book Review.
Haha, I doubt that it would cause glue-sniffing, it might cause knitting though...Our youngest son (almost 12) asked me to show him again how to knit, and we ended up knitting together while listening to an audiobook of The Count of Monte Cristo which he found highly engaging:)
🤣
Building your book monastery -- what a beautiful way to look at your home library. Unplug from machines, retreat to your monastery, feed your soul. Thanks for this thoughtful post, Ruth and Peco.
Glad you enjoyed it :)
Marvellous. I have the same paperback edition of Lord of the Rings as pictured here. I have scheduled a read of volume 3 after Easter. I bought the full set of CS Lewis' Narnia stories after Christmas. I hadn't read them since my early teens (which was, shall we say, quite some time ago) and thoroughly enjoyed them. My mother has now borrowed them to read herself! Some books, like Tolkien, you can read again and again. Others I get bored with. I loved Jane Austen but haven't wanted to read them in years. Maybe one day. I, too, have a passion for old books and love the inscriptions. I wish you well with your rescue efforts!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and encouragement:) I have to admit that I would rather re-read Austen than Tolkien, but always love revisiting the Narnia stories. Yes the inscriptions in old books are always a pleasant discovery. The 1854 dictionary illustrated here was apparently a gift "from Aunt Margret Kierstead to her nephew Kenneth E. Todd" in 1935. It must already have counted as an antique back then and I am curious how it found its way to the floor of the used bookstore where I found it...
Yes, the stories books could tell! I recently got a French copy of Dom Gueranger's Liturgical Year from an English bookseller. It has the stamp of the Abbey of Ste Cecile de Solesmes inside, so it must have travelled with them to exile in England in 1903 or thereabouts. Why didn't it go back to France with them? How did it leave their library and where did it go? Books are so interesting!
I am glad to see that I am not alone in using A Canticle for Leibowitz as a field guide. Beautiful.
That and The Road. I am may be more on my own with this last one.
I read both of those books over the past year, and loved them. The Road was really moving in the end, and chilling at times, and Canticle more cerebral, but they are both high on my list of favorites. (Not that I would wish either future to come to pass!)
Peco- I think A Canticle is a very good novel but an absolutely great book. Come to think of it, it might be just about time to read it again. Yes, The Road is truly beautiful. I read it as 'objectively ambiguous'--particularly the ending. I think McCarthy forces us to decide whether there is hope. And hope in what? What I have sometimes called Dark Hope.
I hope all is well in the Pecosian household. -Jack
I think the Road’s ending – a final little section that is nature-focused – bears striking resemblance to some of the nature-focused transitional sections in Canticle. I don’t know if it was chance or just two great creative minds thinking the same way.
Jack - so nice to hear from you! Peco gave me the book as a birthday present and I was immensely taken with the idea of booklegging. The Road is also a striking read, although much more terrifying. Hope you are well :)
Ruth- Excellent choice on books! I have been haunted by A Canticle for Leibowitz for at least 15 years. Which might explain a thing or two about how I think about things. I don't listen to many audiobooks but the one for A Canticle is excellent. Well worth the time, if you have the chance. As is the audiobook for The Road.
I am well. I hope all is well with you. -Jack
Jack, Peco, Ruth et al - pressed for time because blessed with family visiting, but Canticle for Liebowitz - read it mid-1960s - got it down last night and skimmed. Where 'bookleggers'?
'Memorabilia' and the legend of the martyrdom of the Saint Founder of the Order, yes, but 'reality' of the survival of the key revival texts of math and physics was a nuclear bomb shelter walled in by the blast that killed them ('Emily's tooth') and the civilisation? Can't find my copy of Farenheit 451, (Ray Bradbury), which I remember as explicitly 'bootleggers', but old man's memory!
PS Just a thought, I tend to think of poetry as 'the DNA' of cultural transmission via words, and maths similarly (as in the Canticle) as the DNA of modern physical science. Both can reappear from refugia and live again starting in a few, even in one individual mind?
PPS JM Greer the Druid attempted to revive / promote the treasured book store a dozen years ago, a touch naively in retrospect, but worth a mention. If Paul Kingsnorth is an example for us English / Brits, then visiting small pre-reformation churches in particular is implicate education. He is reproducing this experience at Holy Wells in Ireland this while.
Thanks for adding your thoughts Philip - particularly "DNA of cultural transmission'. If you are looking for the specific reference for bootleggers, it's on pg.63 in my copy where there is s flashback to Isaac Edward Leibowitz's founding of a new community to, "preserve human history for the great-great-great-grandchildren of the children of the simpletons who wanted it destroyed...It's members were either 'bookleggers' or 'memorizers', according to the tasks assigned. The bookleggers sumuggled books to the southwest desert and buried them there in kegs."
Thanks Ruth, got it p53 my copy. Quaint stuff elderly memory. Goodness, Nate Hagens calls his educational non-fictional project The Great Simplification presumably conscious of the fictional tradition. Guess he is looking for the cultural DNA among us!
Don't want to labour this but taking in Canticle for Liebowitz again has been an odd experience. It seemed immensely sad, especially, somehow, the theology. This was America and the null answer. The themes have bobbed up again recently (Hagens is quoting 'bright flashes'). 70 years on of course fall-out like Chernobyl has not caused anything like that scale of mutation and selection. And these days there would be no 2nd round of industrial civilisation; the 2nd half of energy and material sources we are left with are too hard to get. We did not know it then but there will be no spaceships even if there was somewhere to go.
I felt that the second part and especially the ending of the book offered a bleak and dismal future (and yes, with sad and hopeless theology). The part of the book that resonated with me was the first section, especially the role bookleggers and memorizers, which can serve valuable roles. Peco's novel "Exogenesis" offered a much more plausible, possible, and ultimately hopeful future.
Sorry, typo, 'explicitly bookleggers' of course.
I've found some amazing totally forgotten classics from the Pulitzer Prize Fiction Winners from the 1920's and 1930's. In the book "Laughing Boy," I learned about Navajo's assimilation into European Settler culture in the 1920's as their own culture vanishes. Given it was written so long ago, it seemed pretty authentic. The book "So Big" taught me about farming on the plains and the introduction of asparagus to the American diet through a story about a mother/son relationship. Nobody talks about these books but they're real gems - written with much thought, back when people used a richer language than we use today. Many are out of print but available on thriftbooks for cheap, or through inter-library loan.
If you liked Laughing Boy, you will adore The Education of Little Tree. Like the power of Old Yeller, a loved story can be a tearful joy.
Thank you! I have such reverence for Native American culture so I will certainly read that one.
We live in a Golden Age of book collecting, due to reasons like libraries getting rid of wonderful books to make room for the new, as well as the plethora of garage/estate sales where books of all sorts are available for a song. It truly is a great time to be a book lover!
The only time I feel any pangs over owning so many books is when we move. (We are currently in the process of moving.) So when we've packed countless boxes of books and they stack in towers everywhere, I wonder if we're a bit mad. My husband and I do cull our collection a bit here and there, removing books that no longer serve our family, but inevitably purchase more every year.
Yes moving with books is definitely not easy. When we moved four years ago, it felt like the majority was just bookshelves and boxes of books:) All the best with your move!
My books represent worlds off thought and imagination. I group books by the conversation that they are having with each other, in which I can join simply by seeing them. When I use my own mind, I place thoughts and questions and referents upon shelves, ready to take them down any time their participation would add to the work that I do. When a book sits beside another, they are speaking. So I have near to each other Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi, Avicenna, and then Tolkien and Beagle! ... Or also, Galeano, Kapuscinski, Nasdiij, and Arundhati Roy. Every day that my dear friends lay in boxes in my basement, I long for them, their good company, their spring of inspiration that will turn my mundane microcosm into an infinitely sublime chance to play simultaneously about the firmament.
Once as a new student I lost my way, entered the wrong courtyard, and then further, the wrong room. Upon seeing an attractive shelf of books, I began to read their spines, growing in excitement, before I realized that I had intruded upon the privacy of some delightful person unknown. Ashamed to be possibly found in this private sanctuary without invitation, I shook off the enchantment and fled, hoping not to be noticed. Now, I mourn the loss of that possible friend, and wish that I had been found, even forced myself to be so discovered. Surely a common scholarly enthusiasm would have assured our bond to be inviolable by that brief social transgression. I mourn the loss of the friends I have not met. Even, as I passed through neighborhoods, I look at the windows and imagine what if I were to have a singular literary x-ray vision, to see the books on the shelves. Then they would become for me my friends, my mentors, those with whom I could come to New understandings of the world. Just only then would remain for me the knocking upon the door, and the hopeful opening. I love my friends from other centuries and times, but I grieve more the yet living friends upon whose doors I have not dared knock.
This is wonderful. I have been thinking lately of the value of incorporating well-made and beautiful books. We have many paperbacks that aren’t that appealing to the senses, but sometimes that’s what’s available or what one can afford. I think it was Autumn Kern who, in a video, explained how she buys well-made beautiful books on the cheap by frequenting estate, library, and school sales, etc, too. I personally have been using Thrift Books for a while and really appreciate the selection and affordability!
I have come across our most treasured books for free. My favourite "East of Eden" is a first edition and has a beautiful green cloth cover - the thrift store sold it for $3.99! Buying on the cheap is truly a pleasure (I actually just came home with "Roughing It" by Mark Twain which I found for $1.50 :)
Agreed! The most beautiful books tend to be old books (probably because books were more valued back then). I have a book from the 1700's at home. It is stunningly beautiful and well made - no wonder it has survived until now.
Then again, I also have a treasured collection of Christian paperbacks with hideous front covers (really really bad). It is a fun little collecting hobby of mine.
If civilization suddenly ended, and all our digital content vanished, future people exploring the remains of your home might assume the brightest people on earth lived in the 1700s.
Sometimes the hideously ridiculous covers are a treasure in themselves. :)
Indeed! That's why I collect them :) (and shouted for joy when I found my most coveted prize - will post a note about it).
Book are an island of sanity in a world gone mad. We need more people anchored to the physical world and less people living in virtual universes.
Hello, used bookstore owner here! Our classics section is constantly diminished, not because we toss them out, but because people won't stop buying them, which I find massively encouraging in the face of all the bad news about declining literacy and books no longer being assigned in schools.
Aria, that is wonderful to hear and indeed very encouraging!
I've been keeping an eye on the growing list of comments on this post, and I just want to say how wonderful and endearing all of these comments are! There is nothing quite like a bunch of bookish people talking and reveling in the goodness of the printed word. It warms the heart!
Agreed ! It is always a true pleasure to see so many readers engage and share their stories (and love of books :)
What a pleasure to read. Thank you for your work
Thanks for reading :)
Beautiful! Thank you so much for this lovely gift. I only skimmed it, but can see it’s a treasure. Must print out to read more carefully - can’t deal with having the screen in the way. And speaking of screens, it is very depressing to consider the fact that millions of people engage with the printed word on their cell phones. How diminished everything is through that conduit, apart from its harms.
Glad you enjoyed it Anne:) I am with you in the paper over pixels preference :)