Til now, I had never known love

This image is of the back of the stage at one end of the main room of The Antiquarium in Brownville, NE. Map cases. Art. Wood.

There are whole areas that smell vaguely of stained glass studio and a room with a typewriter from some time in the Dark Ages that my fingers twitched to touch, to use, to bring to life for them.

I did not buy anything. I took my father there on Sunday. He bought a 2 volume set of Plutarch's Lives. He told me that I had made an impression on my previous visit on the proprietor (a bare-foot and amiable Tom), who described me as self-affected (or -effected, I am not sure which). He continued to say that I knew what I wanted to do and didn't need anyone to help me. Wrapped in my tweed and scarf clutching scrap paper to my chest as a blanket, I believe the description is not unkind, but correct. My parents agree.

There is a kind of similarity about places and people who show love to each other through the medium of books. It is the spaces that I love: the specificity in a reading area; the smell of contemplation; the muffled sounds of trafficked floors and the deliberately random conversations. Everything you can see is alive in a place that loves the life of books and book-people. Every book is a conversation and when you open it at random or on purpose, the conversation invites response. It is the same with the people who care for collections of books.

There is a difference between a life that is spent living and one that is spent collecting. A room with a bunch of books is not the same as a room that is a library. I worked with books that were treated as objects, as commodity, and never could internalize it. Library is the world of books that makes sense to me. There is some kind of order, it doesn't even matter particularly what kind of order as long as order exists. Collections and sections exist, as to interactions between those collections and sections and their curators and their interactors. Intra-Library networks.

I love the smell of bookshelves. I love that I know someone who smells the differences in dust as chocolate or lemon custard. I love that I argue with someone about what exactly defines a library and that there is someone else whose definition matches mine exactly. I love that there is someone in this world whose life is like the one that I want to live.

That all paled the moment I walked fully into The Antiquarium. There is a soaring of spirit that happens with love. A kind of smile that is only partly on the lips, the rest of it living in lungs and spleen and leg muscles.  A challenge and contentment. The possibility of Life.

A beautiful thing about loving the spaces of books is the 's' at the end of the word. Plural. Unconfined. Possible.

I live in a town with a used book store like a used book store. It is jarring. I come from a city with two used book stores like libraries, the most comfortable and accommodating way stations for books and their likers and their lovers. A Novel Idea and Bluestem Books changed my way of thinking about bookshops entirely, and for the better. The Antiquarium showed me a way of my future.

It is good to fall in love again.