There seem to be two kinds of people on this earth—those who love books and everyone else. The bookish have always been far outnumbered, and the gap must be widening in this age of endless digital entertainment. I count myself among the proud minority, but a book, of all things, has brought into question my lifelong practice of keeping a private library.
A recent acquisition illustrates the issue.
“Didn’t you just read this on your Kindle,” Lisa asks me as she flips through the book I’ve brought home.
I dislike direct questioning about my book-buying habits. It feels like the pointed inquiries on medical questionnaires about alcohol consumption.
“Yeah, but I liked it so much I wanted the hard copy,” I tell her.
The fact is, I will likely never read this book, even though I did enjoy it. I bought the book because I like having a visual, tangible record of the time this book and I spent together. I like scanning my shelves and seeing proof of a rich reading life. I like the way a roomful of books makes me feel about myself. Besides, I tell myself, there are worse ways to spend money.
Like most fixations, the origin can often be traced to our youngest days. Pine bookcases flanked the living room fireplace of my childhood home. I can picture the red and black spines of the encyclopedias that filled half those shelves. I spent hours poring over those portals of knowledge at an unnaturally young age. What an odd duck I must have been, this quiet young boy with his nose stuck in an encyclopedia.
A public library beckoned four blocks away, a magical place for a shy little kid. When a kind librarian led me to a shelf of thirty or forty Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators mystery books, I knelt in almost religious piety, awestruck.
I must have viewed that library as a refuge from the troubles my eight-year-old brain struggled to process at home. I felt safer exploring a haunted citadel in Istanbul with Jupiter Jones than I did around my own family. Later, when the divorce was final, and I moved with my mom and new stepdad to a trailer park in Forks, I dreamed of the calm order of that library — the hush and quiet — amidst the babble and grunge of a beaten-down logging town, our family the poorest in a landfill of white trash.
Living hand to mouth at a young age forever shaped my views on the importance of having enough money, but I’ve always spent freely on books. If I look up from where I write this, I can spot my earliest purchases. A Sentimental Education. Look Homeward, Angel. The Sun Also Rises. These old friends have stuck with me my entire life. Eight apartments and three houses, always near.
If I widen my gaze to take in the walls of shelves surrounding me — a collection of some two thousand volumes now — I can trace the outline of my life’s obsessions: boxing, gardening, philosophy, strategy, bird watching, statistics, history, poetry. Shelves and shelves of sailing and tall ships and the sea, books that even here in the desert can launch me miles and miles offshore. And so much great literature: the French, the Russians, the English, the Americans. These last shelved by era, early to late.
Each spine has meaning to me. I recall at a glance where and who I was when I read it. Pulling a book down from the shelves, I feel transported. The heft of the book in my hands, the smell, particularly from my oldest books, wafting up as I thumb through the pages, letting a random passage catch my eye. I read and remember.
In every other part of my life, I am downsizing, simplifying. Most unhappiness stems from a desire for material things. I fantasize about renting a flat in Madrid for three months with just a few clothes, a journal, and my Kindle. And yet, here I sit in this roomful of material things, these books of comfort and consolation, in complete denial of what I know to be true.
I admire those grand Country Manors with their massive libraries passed down for generations. Until recently, I imagined a distant future when my grandchildren and their grandchildren would cherish my library. Yet, times have changed. I have no Country Manor, and books, once the pinnacle of knowledge and wisdom, are no longer quite so prized.
Shaun Bythell, in his memoir, The Diary of a Bookseller, tells the awful truth. In his business, he buys personal libraries from estates. The heir, often the son or daughter of the deceased, shows little emotion toward the collection of dusty books they’ve inherited. “What would I want with all these?” They look around, bewildered. What must have cost a fortune and a lifetime to assemble is sold, gratefully, for $500. My shock when I read about this first encounter turned to numb despair as the situation repeated at various estates throughout the memoir. No one wants these books. No one.
I called my daughter in Los Angeles. She’s a reader like me but prefers a Kindle to physical books. Of course, she wants the books, she said, but without much enthusiasm.
The notion that this library and I might share the same dissolution took a while to accept, like a wild plot twist in a novel you didn’t see coming. Perhaps it never dawned on me how used bookstores acquire so many wonderful books in the first place. I pull down book after book for evidence. A set of Wallace Stegner books I purchased last year bears the previous owner’s carefully inscribed name and address. A Google search turns up the obituary: her death preceded my purchase by two short months.
As I consider the likely future of this little library, I feel more reflective than anguished. After all, books are beacons of light for me, as for many wayward travelers. Let that be enough. My gaze slips along the spines, and I acknowledge each silently. How many thousands of hours have we spent together, ruminating, investigating? How many journeys? These books have shaped and reshaped me. How can you tell where the stories end and the man begins?
I imagine a time when these books take flight, like a great host of swallows, all chaos and boxes and pages aflutter, and in time settle on a thousand different shelves to inspire a thousand new owners.
Until then, let’s commiserate together, my friends, my shipmates. Let us sing on the deck of this foundering ship, our voices a cheer across the ages.
Bob, this us wonderful. We too, have. Many books, some on shelves, some in boxes. Mostly Bill’s at this point, as I have donated many if mine already. Take your time. Continue to enjoy your old friends.
Thank you, Sukey. It’s good to hear from you. Hope you and Bill are well. Thanks for reading!
Of probably thousands of emails/articles I read, your blog posts probably (there, I used probably twice in one sentence, take that Mrs White, 8th grade English teacher) have the most meaning. Yes, I struggle with books (I wrote a few months back about a bookcase of early 1900’s books I obtained from a house my son bought). I appreciate your focus and thoughtfulness.
Bruce — Thank you for your kind comment. We must be kindred spirits!
Your book choices seem carefully selected, while I have always favored books chosen at random, picked up at a vrbo book shelf. I suppose I must self select subconsciously, but this trove of popular literature from 1900-1920 has taught me much about pre-radio, pre-mass media. I have discovered that some of the titles were quite popular at the time. No great works of literature, often spinoffs from Hollywood movies, sometimes silent.
Thank you for this. I enjoyed it so much. I love my paperback books. My family and I are missionaries overseas and years ago started to buy more e-books to keep from the extra weight in our suitcases. Slowly but surely, we built up a new library anyway, but two years ago we evacuated from the country we were serving in and left our books in our home there. Since then, our family has been more or less forced to live minimally, and it’s been freeing in a lot of ways. And with small children and public transportation and other traveling, my Kindle definitely fits our lifestyle better. But there’s nothing like a physical book, and I miss them.
I will always remember your beautiful book room on Vashon.
The space had its own energy.
I often said I’d be lost to that room because it was so lovely.
In total agreement with you about book collecting. We are in the process of creating an in house library from one of the girls’ bedrooms.
Yours is always in my heart as I plan optimum usage of this small space.
Thank you for being a fellow book lover.
I feel a little less crazy knowing I’m not the only one!
Many blessings to you and yours! Rebecca Raymond
Thank you for this, I agree with your sentiment as well but I don’t agree that these private libraries have lost importance. In fact it is quite the opposite for a number of reasons you may not be aware of, but I did get enjoyment from this read. It also reminded me of a scene in the film the 9th gate where first edition Don Quixotes were sold (for pennies) at a similar scene to what you describe.
The public library budgets in most places today are based on continuous circulation of titles. Classics which may not receive as much circulation eventually are reduced and removed until they are no longer available. The libraries donate these to private third parties, who then either sell them at inflated prices (above market) or immediately recycle them in a paper pulper because they deemed the content objectionable; Goodwill does this as do many other charities. The process from start to finish has many parallels with book burnings from WW2. At one point in time Paradise Lost was in every household, and now its become much more difficult to find; not impossible but still difficult and there are many other books that just simply vanish.
Digital books also are licenses not ownership of the book, and as a result are often removed without prior notice or refund. When these things vanish, you have no alternative and you can potentially lose a core part of your history which should be protected by society but isn’t. You can’t count on them.
There is a also unique feature in post 1980 works, and works published in the 1970s and prior. Newer material obfuscates useful knowledge in clever but subtle ways. Books written earlier focus on the doing, and intuition, reasoning, and rules of thumb whereas books after this period focus on math models and numbers that you must get from them (where information is not provided how they derived them, or itself is contradictory; a falsehood). There seems to have been a giant shift in published material during that time to a brittle rote-based system based in fallacy for a majority of works abandoning past methods of teaching which just worked.
Finally, in the near future in all likelihood there probably will be a dramatic reversion back to physically printed media. It is useful technology for preserving knowledge over multiple generations, and digital technology cannot be trusted, and will be abandoned eventually because of synthetic misinformation, and the other characteristics indicating a trend of creeping ruin that will inevitably result in reduced production. The world we live in today is Anathem, with subtle elements common to torture embedded in everyday processes. This trend runs parallel with net production value going negative (as it does with all government work), and as food becomes scarce, it reduces population following Malthus (economic collapse/malthus reversion/a great dying).
I don’t want to sound like some random doomer, but the simple fact is this tracks rationally; and there are quite a lot of crazy and irrational people out there that can’t consider what some might think as unthinkable.
The driving mechanism is money printing, which is runaway. It outcompetes legitimate market business, markets shrink and concentrate until only state run entities survive (through preferential loans, and consolidation), and at the point where real business exits completely (when debt growth exceeds GDP, the same stage as outflows exceeding inflows in a ponzi) then you have defacto state of non-market Socialism where no real exchange can exist. The medium of exchange at that point is abandoned because its no longer a store of value. Producers & Consumers cease economic activity per Adam Smith’s requirements, but its primarily decided by the producers.
Socialism as an economic system is well established as a failed system, and results in collapse for 6 intractable reasons, one being the economic calculation problem, first described by Mises. He wrote extensively about this in the 1930s, you can read more about it in Mises – Socialism, its available from mises.org as a pdf iirc free of charge. Though, it is a hyper-rational work (back when words had one non-contradictory meaning, requiring an equally old dictionary), making it quite a dense and difficult read, it is quite prescient though.
Anyone holding onto a private library with useful knowledge for survival is just being prudent, and hopefully any children are educated enough to realize this, though the centralized educational system does a great disservice to youth passing through it, in its use of 洗腦 techniques.
My uncle has a private library in his house. It’s an absolute joy for me when I visit him. Everything is organized by topic and his collection grows everytime I come by. I dream for that.