Books

         "But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows…

Leon Wieseltier, "Voluminous"

          Oh, how I can relate to this!  One of the most visible results of my move in January to the family house downtown are the piles of boxes of books in the long hallway, which also serves as an art gallery exhibition area for my matted and framed photographs.   They are also on the walls in all the bedrooms upstairs.   And in those rooms are also piles of books that have no shelves to cradle them in bookish comfort.  The beautiful, custom-built white bookshelves in the two main bedrooms have long since been filled to overflowing.   So full that I have resorted to stuffing books into spaces on the shelves on top of the rows of books.   There is a system and order to this despite the seeming chaos.  I generally know where to find any of my 2,000+ books, which is  a conservative estimate.   

My books are my most precious possession along with my photos and the selected memorabilia I have preserved and saved for decades.  They re-tell the story of my life, what I am interested in, my type of intellectual curiosity, what I have saved from childhood and high school and college.   I read the Hardy Boys books, the Walton Boys outdoors adventures, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars and Venus science fiction series.  I have copies of books and plays in yellowing paperback editions from the 60s and 70s that made lasting impressions on me:   Our Town by Thornton Wilder; Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson (read in 9th grade and amazingly I still have the paperback copy I read back then); The Vintage Mencken, a collection of the great newspaperman’s bitingly witty writing collected by Alistair Cooke; The Penguin Classics edition of Cousin Pons by Honore Balzac, one of my all-time favorite novels; and my 1973 college paperback edition of Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook, a collection of essays and stories by one of the finest prose stylists in the English language.   I am so glad I have faithfully held on to those books.   I really want to re-read them some day.

I have many coffee table books of art and photography and these I treasure immensely.  When I was giving away books to the library this past December and January during the preparation for the move out of my apartment, it was unthinkable to part with most of those beautiful books, many works of art themselves.   I love the feel of those books, the heft, the binding, the smell of the paper, the fact that contained within are images and words that can instantly transport me to worlds far from my own and into the lives of great artists and photographers and social documentarians who have influenced my own photographic art for decades.

I may not read many of the books I buy, but just having them surround me gives me comfort and peace.  It’s the feeling of knowing at any moment of the day or night I can reach over and open a book and begin filling my mind with great thinking and images.   

I used to think my chaotic library spread out all over the place was more the exception than the rule until I found sites on the Web where people post pictures of their own libraries.  Some are elegant and neat but others are just overflowing collections like my own.   I have seen pictures of book collections cascading up spiral staircases and filling every wall in every room in a house.    I feel better going to this Web site:

Bookmania

bookmania.me

Today I bought two books on my Amazon Kindle app.  That’s in addition to the books I have recently bought from the Apple iBooks store on mky iPad, and on my Nook app via Barnes and Noble.  Now I have virtual libraries of dozens of books. I don’t think the printed book will ever go away.   There will always ben fine art and photography books on fine paper and bound and printed to survive the ages.   But most novels and textbooks, and even most new works of non-fiction ( which is what I buy), will be in e-book formats and easily read on tablet computers like the iPad and on dedicated reading devices like the Nook Color and Kindle Fire.  The future of publishing is here and  not to far off in that future there may not be many overstuffed collections of printed books in bookshelves and personal libraries.   Coming generations will marvel at such sights and eventually will probably see them only in museums.  But I am happy to say, my personal library will be around for a long time, as long as I have anything to say about it.

"A wall of books is a wall of windows…"  How very true.

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