To Bookcases and Bookshelves

Companion Library Book Series

In the house on Caruth, the den was wood paneled with built-in bookcases on one wall. To the right were the kids' books: Junior Classics,Winnie the Pooh, Companion Library Books that had two stories in every book, so I could flip the book over, turn it and start a another one.

But to the left were the serious books. A row of Collier’s Encyclopedia. A Time Life Series on Life and Science with pictures of men from Amazon tribes with scarred, unsmiling faces. A yearbook series of the 1960’s covering the major events: space travel, Kennedy’s assassination, Woodstock, Nixon’s election. Nursing textbooks from my mom’s years at Charity Hospital. They smelled like medicine, pages thick and shiny. Photos of babies with measles, grown men in diapers, deformities of hands and ears and mouths. Our Bodies Ourselves. Fully illustrated. Fully.

In high school, for research papers, I would go to the local university library, through the bright lobby with wooden desks, 4 chairs tucked into each, the neat line of card catalogs, students bending over the drawers, picking over card after card. I’d walk past the wide rows of reference books to the staircase in the back, to the 5th floor, the stacks. Rows not much wider than myself, books from floor to ceiling, the perfume of paper and ink and metal. It was the scent of intelligence and romance. Surely, I would meet my first lover in the stacks.

Gradually, I filled up my own bookcases with slim volumes of poetry. Had I been a novelist, I would have needed more space, but the economy of poetry has always saved me. My bookcase was a mirror, a story, a play in 72 volumes: TS Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsburg, Robert Creeley, Adrienne Rich, Laura Jensen, Jack Gilbert, Pablo Neruda, Rilke. Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms. The Oxford English Dictionary I read with a magnifying glass.

A couple shelves of our books

Every now and then, with a move or rearranging, I re-order the books. Sometimes by era, sometimes by genre. Alphabetical. Pull them off the shelf. Touch each book, flip the pages. I wonder if my son pulls them down when we don’t notice. Does he study them as a maps into his parents’ world? Are the lines he reads beauty or nonsense? Does he know the difference?