A day with my books

A couple of weeks ago, flush with a paycheck from my part-time minimum wage job, and ignoring the valid and reasonable debts that I have, I decided to take the plunge and spend the 25USD to get become a lifetime member on LibraryThing.

I can't even tell you how pleased I am about this decision. Cuz here's the thing: I read a lot of books. A Lot of Books. Wait a minute, I need to back up a bit.

I have a library of just over 225 books in my office. It is small, and it is growing. A few years ago I decided that I would go to Portugal and so began to weed my life, including my library. I think that I ended up getting rid of about 3/5 of it, maybe more. That was before my appendix burst in August of 2007, I stayed in Lincoln, and by the spring of 2009 my library was 182 books precisely. I had room for every single book on a book shelf, standing vertically. Never let it be said that I have always been in need of new bookshelves. There has been a moment in time when it all fit.

I kept trading books in and out for about a year. In fact, I went 6 months or so without buying books (I even stopped grabbing books from the free book boxes outside of A Novel Idea (those are so damned dangerous)) at all. It was awful. But a growth experience. I am not really fond of miserable growth experiences, and suspect I will not decide to inflict them on myself in future. All that said, I don't have room for all of my books. I work in a used book shop. I get a good deal on them. And I love to read. Also, I am very curious about the look of my library - not the physical set up or the visual aspect of the spines, etc., but the subjects and the range of authors and the quality of the books. By quality I refer to something more subjective than outward monetary value.

There are titles of which I have two copies; one of them a paperback and much written in by me, and the other hardbound with a dust-jacket and relatively pristine. Some books are more comfortable in the pocket of my cargo pants, and some hold up a backpack with ease. There are some titles I love that I never have on hand because I buy cheap paperbacks of them in order to give them away because I think they ought to be read by as many people as possible. I love the size of Loeb Classical Library and Everyman Library books. I love the thin thin pages of collections of Shakespeare and Milton. I love the smell of my father's old textbooks and the trade publications of Freakangels. If a book possesses some such quality that appeals to me and will draw me to it in the future, it is likely to be something that will do well in my library. I might even read it.

Because I do have to be drawn back to my own books again and again and again. I love libraries. I use them, I revel in them, I want to spend the rest of my life working in and around and for and about them. So I tend to use university and public libraries more than I use my own. Which means that in order to be drawn back, there must be something on my shelves that cannot be replaced by someone else's.

I tend to prefer following paths that are known to me and the exercise of cataloging my books online is how I choose to become ever more familiar with these breathing bits of other people's lives and works that define such a large part of this space. I had long wanted to just get the lifetime account, but put it off and off and off until finally I could not justify having rated more than 1000 movies on Netflix, and only 168 on LibraryThing.

Next time: Thoughts on writing reviews (because you know I can talk).

The Cat prefers the knitted rug to the sun beams

It is a slow morning, now barely morphed into afternoon and I won't really notice the time shift until evening when the walk takes me to work again. I do not mind late nights or weird hours. They leave me a bit off-center with nothing but the number of hours between one duty and another and a list of possibilities in between to define what the day becomes.

Right now the world is silent in the house and muffled through the windows and I am jealous of its movement and crisp air and sunshine and errands. I have an errand to run and may turn it into more than one, just for the sake of the fresh and the fall.

I've been writing lots of letters and find that I crave the moments of silence and thought to think of what to say to this person or that person, to have a conversation, no matter how one sided, that is thoughtful and concise and specific, or maybe wandering and filled with words of moments long since passed.

I have been sleeping longer these last few days. Noticeably. I believe that the excitement of extended conversation with a beloved friend and the realization that I must do this more often with different people probably lead to a certain amount of that sleep. Well, that and the damn cricket that chirped all friggin' night long and inspired tremendously deep sleep the next night. Stupid loud mouth. Rather: loud legs.

Something begins to settle into the silent parts of my psyche. Deeply felt joy and self-expression, and something about Haircut Day at The Antiquarium. Of course we were there. Of course. It goes like this:

I met my friend Aubrey for the weekend in Brownville, NE. We stayed at the apartment of a mutual friend (thank you, Cin, you are awesome). We each had something very specific to talk about with the other, and we also had a (as in one) specific place in the area that we wanted to go and sightsee. There are requirements when you visit Brownville and those must be accomplished in and around all of this.

We talked libraries. We talked cave adventures. We found the graveyard and drank some wine. There was lunch and there was an apple and there were salami and cream cheese roll-ups and granola bars and fruit juice. I bought a cookbook with showy soup recipes and we sighed and gasped over the desk and the type left from the newspaper that was there when Southeast Nebraska was the place to be. We strolled. We followed a map, and stopped at the statue of Gov. Furnas and showed a bit of honor and then made the point that it may not have been the best idea to plant a bunch of trees on the prairie. Which is not a place of trees, but of scrub and yucca and wild rose and lead plant and bluestem and thistles and nighthawks and poppies and gut-sucking assassin bugs. And wind. Oh the blessed wind.

The parking area at The Antiquarium is kind of undetermined. The approach to the building allows you think that perhaps it is a lie, that it is closed, that it is really closed, that there is nothing in that almost nondescript brick face. That lasts about 5 seconds until the nose of the car reaches the top of the driveway and you see that there is, in fact, a party going on. Kind of all of the time. The cars are just lined up that way, like they are staying for a while and maybe you need to know someone to be here. And we do. They are the books.

The end of the story is a foregone conclusion: Aubrey bought a book about a library and I put on hold a book about cartographers. I will buy it next weekend when we take my niece to this place and warn her than the cat looks nice, and he is, and he bites.

The beginning of the story is a hug from the universe that we got as we walked in and looked around and saw a man sitting in a chair with a cape over his top half because another man was cutting his hair. Well, it was Haircut Day at The Antiquarium, you see. Tom's barber from Omaha comes down once a month and anyone who wants a haircut that day has to leave Omaha to get it. Nobody buys any books, but everyone gets their hair cut. Oh, and someone brought some wine. We stuck around long enough that it got opened. Shiraz. With conversation.

The cats roam around and I am soft and lightly pen-scratchy for a while longer. There are leftovers of pasta with prosciutto and books to be returned to their library from mine. Now I watch the sun beams and settle comfortably into my chair.

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.