Originally published April 8, 2018.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about books as material objects, and books as containers for stories.
A lot of this is tied up in my thesis research – there’s a strong trend in readers’ advisory scholarship right now to push back against the “connecting readers with books” in favor of “connecting people with stories.” There are a couple of different things to unpack there, and they’re both valid and important. The first is a recognition of the vast and varied landscape of media we swim in today, an encouragement to diversify the language to include people who listen, view, interact, share, create content, who use devices to connect to content, who favor informal and independent platforms and short form and other alternatives to what, these scholars assert, we think of when we think of “readers” and “books”: educated people consuming long-form literary fiction and nonfiction for self-improvement and self-actualization.
(In my own work, I’m asserting the reverse: that we can, and do, include all of those things in our conception of “readers” and “books,” that we understand in practice that people approach content in a lot of different ways, and we cheerfully embrace that. And I hew to the traditional language because the alternative terms, which mostly center around “consuming” and “content,” have heavily commercialized connotations that I have other issues with in a library environment, and as a writer and storyteller.)
The second thing is that when we don’t look “beyond the four corners of the page,” as one scholar says, when we don’t look beyond the structural elements of the text (pacing, setting, plot, tone, writing style, genre) to the context of discovery to find the things that connect people to stories, we ignore the things they’re actually looking for: they’re looking for something that makes them feel a particular way, for today, which is different than how they’ll want to feel tomorrow; they want a connection to a particular cultural experience that is or is not their own; they’re looking for something in the experience of discovery itself that is just as significant, in some ways, as the experience of reading that will follow.
And the thing is when we actually look at what people say about reading and books, overwhelmingly, we find that many, many people, from very young ages and enduring throughout life, have powerful emotional attachments to books as objects, to things, to the physicality of the reading experience, to books as gifts and tokens and mementos, to the spaces where books are exchanged and read, as physical spaces that our bodies move through and where we interact with others who are also interacting with books. And now that e-readers have been on the scene for a few years, we’re learning that people have emotional connections to the containers of this content that are fundamentally different from the emotional attachment they have to books. People talk about the freedom and sense of lightness an e-reader or reading app on a device offers; they talk about the immediacy of access, the security of “never being caught without a book,” the particular immersion that audio offers without the clunkiness of being tied to a CD or tape player. It’s a different experience, and we need to pay attention to that too.
Physicality matters. Embodied experience matters. In a fundamental human sense, touch matters.
I’m working my way through a column published in the Georgia Library Quarterly for the past twelve years, inviting librarians to talk about their personal libraries, whatever that means to them, and however they want to approach talking about it. It’s fascinating reading, which I’m not going to talk about here, but it got me thinking that it was an interesting thought experiment that I would like to do as well. I always enjoy visiting friends’ houses for the first time and scoping out their books – it reveals a person, their library. Seems fair that I should extend that invitation to you, my readers.
I own about a thousand books. I’m in the process of cataloging them on LibraryThing, which I’ve mentioned in passing in other posts, and I’m probably two-thirds of the way through. It’s been interesting, going through and touching every single book – something I’ve done twice in the last two and a half years, once when I packed up the Walsenburg house after John died, and once when I moved into this apartment after the fire. I’m perhaps more aware of my collection right now than I have ever been.
Most of the books are on three ebony IKEA Billy bookshelves, which are overflowing – I really need two more narrow and one more wide unit to fit them all, but there’s just no space in this apartment, so that will have to wait until I move again.
There are two wide shelves and a narrow one between them, and the narrow shelf houses the treasures: the antiquarian books, the super oversized and odd small volumes.
There are three volumes of William Prescott – Philip II, Charles the Fifth, and The Conquest of Mexico – that arrived in the mail out of the blue along with a Vincente Salva French-Spanish translation dictionary (old enough that it doesn’t have a publication date – 1880s maybe?) a few weeks after John, standing in the parking lot outside an SCA event in Colorado Springs in his 16th-century kit smoking a cigarette, struck up a conversation with a resident of the nursing home next door, who turned out to be a retired history professor with a particular interest in Renaissance Spain and New Spain.
Cunliffe’s England in Picture, Song, and Story from 1936; An Outline History of English Literature (1924); Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1891); Legends of the Middle Ages (1896). Two copies of Don Quixote: a ’70s Modern Library reading copy and an undated pre-1900 display copy that I bought for $5 just because sometimes I still – not often, but sometimes – bring home things for no reason other than “John would love this,” and in some way it goes with both the Johnson and the Prescotts. There’s a complete boxed set of political science canon – The Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, The Wealth of Nations, Common Sense, and Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The Rules of Land Warfare in the corrected 1917 edition, and a truly battered, beloved, dog-eared, water-stained, penciled-up School of the Citizen Soldier in the 1942. Two beautiful boxed sets of pre-Columbian Mexican codices: Codice Borgia and Codice de Xicotepec. The third, the Codice de Borbonico, is too big to fit on any shelf – 20″ square and almost 3″ thick – and lives flat on a lower shelf of an end table. A truly enormous portfolio of Stieglitz photographs and another of classic printmakers; a leatherbound set of Architectural Details of Spain and the Mediterranean and Old World Inspiration for American Architecture. All of these, if you can believe it, rescued from the Friends of the Library donation boxes at the tiny Walsenburg library. I’m not sure what the donors thought the library was going to do with them; I imagine they just desperately hoped these precious rare items would find a home somewhere, anywhere. I’m grateful to have been in the right place at the right time.
Lietuviu Liaudes Menas: Audiniai (Lithuanian folk arts: weavings), an odd but beautiful book published in Moscow in 1957, deep in the Soviet-era “aren’t the ethnic people quaint?” climate, which I bought on eBay and translated for a college project in 2005. My Laureling vigil book, which also served as a guestbook at John’s wake; my own one copy of Sanctuary, with a space waiting for Refuge soon; my high school yearbooks. Some of my college bookbinding work, and notebooks filled with scribbles and notes and plans. Things that have no meaning or value to anyone but me, but are tied together by the common thread of my life.
On either side of the narrow shelf, like wings of a building around the central structure, are the mainstream books. There are a lot more art books – a lot. Fully half of my nonfiction collection is either art or history. Military history, some my own collection (tending toward quirky niche topics: Motorcyles at War; Kierson’s Boys of the Dvina, about the Latvian army between the world wars; and, well, Monuments Men) but much of it John’s (tending more toward sprawling, canonical texts: Shirley’s December 1941; Lyall’s The War in the Air, about the RAF in WWII; One Day in a Long War, the defining case study of Vietnam; Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, which I’m not sure he ever read but has now kicked off my current Korean War fascination.) I left a lot of the medieval history books behind when I moved, and then immediately added more. The history section of the reference books were being weeded within a month of when I started at my new job up here, so I threw down money for such treasures as the two-volume Dictionary of Medieval Knighthood and Chivalry, The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance, and Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia. “I’m not going to get any more books, I don’t have room” is a lie.
I don’t keep a lot of fiction, though; most of what I have are things that I do intend to read, but have not gotten to because there’s always more a sense of urgency about getting library books read and returned, and there are always library books. I have more than fifty checked out right now. I can blame the thesis for most of those, but I can’t blame the thesis for the two Ursula LeGuins, the new Peter S. Beagle Overneath, the stack of mid-century history and politics books that are research for Hermitage, or the more current nonfiction: Soonish, about emerging applied sciences developments, Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s new book Skin in the Game, and The Tyranny of Metrics, which on second thought might be thesis-related, after all.
I’ve been buying a lot of local SFF authors since I moved to Denver; I think I have everything Stant Litore has currently out, along with quite a bit of Mario Acevedo, Daniel Willis, and whoever I’ve struck up a conversation with at a con. But by the numbers, most of the fiction is John’s. I got all of the Zelazny and L’Amour and Elizabeth Bear, some of the Heinlein and Tolkien, and it’s not like I don’t have mass-market paperback SFF of my own. I have four boxes in a closet that I simply have nowhere to shelve.
Remnants from college, remnants from writing research. The Lure of the Local, the Lucy Lippard book about the relationship between environment, embodiment, and art, that changed my life and defined my undergrad capstone project; Red by Terry Tempest Williams and Mayordomo by Stanley Crawford, an obscure New Mexico gentleman-farmer-intellectual who is my very most favoritest Interior West essayist. The Daybooks of Edward Weston and all of my Weston photography books, and other art books: Graphic Agitation, Andy Goldsworthy’s Passage (claimed returned to my college library, and paid for anyway, and found months later, much to my chagrin, and it’s mine now, dammit).Lumberjacks and Legislators: Political Economy of the U.S. Lumber Industry, 1890-1941,which came through library donations while I was writing Refuge and which I snatched up because the overlap was too uncanny to be believed*, and which was, indeed, very useful in writing Cathedral. Cat Urbigkit’s luminous Shepherds of Coyote Rocks, which transformed my understanding of high country sheep husbandry. The tiny handful of MLIS textbooks I’ve bought – I’ve ILLed what I could, and bought more as e-books. All my linguistics books and Lithuanian language books from undergrad and more recent acquisitions: A Dictionary of Southern Colorado and New Mexico Spanish, which I’ve owned for years just because it’s a Walsenburg thing, y’all, but which was invaluable in writing Citadel; and The Art of Language Invention, which was a godsend right at the end of working on Sanctuary and pivotal for Refuge.
My treasured 1623 Minsheu English-Spanish dictionary – I paid $20 for that facsimile edition, but now it’s $55, and I’d pay it again without blinking. But that brings me back to the SCA books. I let go of a lot of the history, as I said, but I kept more of the hands-on SCA books. I’ll never let go my Janet Arnolds, obviously, or the weaving books, or all of John’s woodworking and metalworking books, or the calligraphy and illumination books, or the cookbooks.
Probably 200 cookbooks. SCA cookbooks – my Sent Sovi that I bought for my first feast and still reference frequently, the brewing books, the culture-specific cuisine history books, all the 70s camping books that I pulled out of library donations for camp kitchen inspiration. (There’s a well-worn 1950 edition of TM 10-412, too, to go with the military history books, and those old Army mess hall recipes are hella practical for large-group catering.) A lot of New Mexico cookery, including the the classic red-covered Santa Fe Cookbook and Restaurant Guide, which is basically my Betty Crocker. But I do have Betty Crocker too, and Julia Child, in the original editions. And twelve years of Cooks’ Illustrated in bound volumes.
There’s probably more of my own cash money in the cookbooks than in the rest of the collection combined; so much of my general collection is utterly serendipitous, “I have to hold on to this – I’ll never see it again,” rescued from library donation piles and FOL booksale end-of-days and used bookstores and Goodwills and friends’ weedings for a dollar or five or $20 a bag; but the cookbooks I bought new. Roden’s Food of Spain, Keller’s Ad Hoc At Home – the first book I ever paid more than $50 for – and so much Ruhlman: Charcuterie, Salumi, Ruhlman’s Twenty, Ratio, Egg, The Reach of a Chef. Yeah, I’ll basically pony up for anything Ruhlman writes, and have, more than once: I’ve given away three copies of Ratio and two copies of Twenty. Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is another book I’ll buy just to give away.
Gifts. Among the cookbooks is Garwood and Voight’s Food Mania, a wonderfully offbeat, saturated roller-coaster ride of vintage commercial food art – graphics, ads, reference drawings, photographs, given to me by one of my dearest friends, who knows me well enough to know how much I appreciate the sheer weirdness of it. There are the Santayanas I bought for John our first Christmas together, and the China Mievilles he bought for me a few years later. The Hampton Court Palace kitchens guidebook that my Laurel brought back from a trip to England, and the embroidery and costuming books she gave me. A copy of A Fifteenth Century Cook Boke, much loved but meticulously preserved,given to me by one of my judges at a Kingdom ArtSci. A catalogue from an exhibition that my capstone advisor was part of that was a graduation gift. One of John Fielder’s early books of Colorado photography that a coworker pulled from weeds for me just last week; I was stunned and touched that she saw it and thought of me, and then I showed my appreciation by talking for five minutes nonstop about John Fielder, which was probably more information than she needed.
I’ve always loved books. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t own books – there were books that were distinctly mine in my very earliest memories, and I remember claiming them, keeping them in my room, segregating my personal treasures from my mother’s books. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Narnia and Island of the Blue Dolphin – I couldn’t have been more than seven.
Even when my ex and I were briefly homeless in my early twenties, there was one box of books in the trunk of the car that stayed with us. I still own a couple of those books. Charles DeLint’s Memory and Dream and Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, my two favorite fiction books in all the world, which I re-read every couple of years, although I’m not sure I have the heart for Memory and Dream right now. Eisenhower’s Mandate for Change and Gorbachev’s Perestroika, which are probably the beginning of my substantial Soviet studies and Cold War studies collections; I have always been about primary sources and the first person.
When I look at these shelves I see what’s missing too. All of the books John and his ex bought in and about England, many of his art books, much of his SFF collection. All the books that didn’t make the cut over all the moves. My kids’ books – we never owned a lot of children’s books, we were heavy heavy library users all through their childhood and kids outgrow books as fast as they outgrow shoes, or at least my little intellectual omnivores did; but we had an ever-rotating collection of battered trade paperback chapter books and classics and picture books from the Barnes & Noble discount bin, some of which have become enduring favorites that I put into the hands of library kids all the time – Keven Henkes and Patricia Polacco and Jan Brett.
For the first time in my life, I don’t own an encyclopedia set; it’s just too much shelf space, and I have online resources now. There are all the books I bought and read for my undergrad capstone project and loved deeply and felt were so important that I gave them to the Walsenburg library so other people would have access to them: Wendell Berry and Ed Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams and Ellen Meloy, my first copy of Mayordomo and my only copy of Crawford’s Garlic Testament.
There are the books I want to own but do not yet: replacement copies of some of those lost; and things I’ve discovered, read as library books, desperately wanted to keep but had to give back, and have kept in the back of my mind to acquire when next they cross my path. Books that haven’t been written yet, or are in the process of being written. The forthcoming Janet Arnold; Lea Benson’s forthcoming Central Asian clothing history book.
The next novel I love so much I’ll know I’ll want to re-read it. The next novel I buy on the spot because I had a great conversation with the author at some event or other. The next collection of hands-on books or research about the next hobby or subject that captivates me. The next worn little turn-of-the-century volume of poetry that enchants me.
*In the books’ timeline, the mill for which Darzins’ Mill is named operated from 1891-1941, shut down during the war due to lack of labor and focus shifting to agricultural work, briefly reopened in 1945 and shut down permanently in 1947. How random is it that 1.) someone wrote a book about that exact period of the American lumber industry and 2.) I found it, not by looking for the topic, but by accident?