Other People’s Books
I love other people's books. When I go to people's homes (back when we went into each other's homes), I love looking at the host's bookshelves and coffee tables. What are they reading? What have they read? What do they want their guests to think they've read? The way some people scour Zillow for dirty little real estate secrets, book peeping is my guilty pleasure. I'm not really all that guilty about it, or secretive, because asking people about the books on their shelves has provided plenty of ice breaking opportunities.
Keep in mind, I love my books too but I love them even more when they used to be other people's books. The majority of our books are second-hand, in fact, I can't remember the last time I bought a new book in any kind of store, online or otherwise and when I buy a book from an online bookseller, I find myself heading increasingly for the copies in "Acceptable" condition compared to the "Good" or "Like New." True, you sometimes get a book in terrible shape—I once bought a book that arrived as if it had been marinated in Italian oil with the last 150 pages nearly translucent in grease, doubly embarrassing in that it was purchased as a gift for a friend—but more often you get a book that tells two stories. A recently purchased copy of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, which inspired today's newsletter, came complete with handwritten notes in the margin, which I have been enjoying nearly as much as Mann's prose. Tightly scribbled impressions will identify what each character represents and the chapters are ended with a summation. The author of the notes appears to be in conversation with him- or herself, jotting down "See? I was right!" pages after a hypotheses is proven correct. Certain sections are highlighted or marked with a question mark and one passage is underlined with a thickly penned "YUPP." I have several books that tell stories of this kind. Used books with library stamps still in them. Books with a list of previous owners inside the title flap. I have a bevy of dedications for gifts that apparently did not enchant their receiver, the most heartbreaking is one in a book called Opera In America, admittedly a fairly dry affair, that says "To XXXXXX." The book, when I bought it, looked as if it had barely been opened.
Like many of my annotated editions, the notes in Doctor Faustus abruptly stop about 25% into the book, on page 147 to be exact. Which means I have to go the other 370 pages all by myself. Many of the books in our shelves that are inscribed with Liz Lidgett's high school hand also have a curious habit of abandoning note taking early on in the exercise (for my part, I didn't read books long enough to even pretend to take notes in them in high school). In poring through all of Liz's old school books, I have yet to find a single incidence of "Mrs. Nick Renkoski" written with little hearts dotting the eyes but then, that's something Liz has never aspired to. The most controversial book in our shelves is a second-hand copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass which I bought at a garage sale in high school but Liz erroneously believes has been hers all these years, acquired somehow (her story has changed throughout the years but mine, benefiting from actually having happened, has remained the same). I am telling you this because I believe in the truth but just know that simply typing these words is going to cost me dearly.
We have two sets of bookshelves, one in the living room where we keep the company books. In my mind, books on display for company should be those that are most well-written or culturally relevant. It has been explained to me several times that that is not how it works. Our shelves are arranged by color and only the best looking are allowed in this space. My tattered copies of classics, great though they may be, are hidden away on the secondary shelves, which is why Don Quixote finds itself relegated to the losers table while Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell, with its pleasing red snakeskin binding is on full view. I completely understand why our copy of Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich lives in the secondary bookshelves, given its spine's prominent swastika. Readers of the book know that it is no fan of Adolf and the boys but a symbol of hate in the living room would definitely draw eyes and assumptions (the copy was originally my mother's and it was housed in the basement bookshelves, probably for the same reason). To be fair, plenty of my books are playing the big room, even some tattered ones including a Moby-Dick from 1920 which is the right kind of weathered and a complete works of Edgar Allen Poe which has its jacket torn in a fittingly macabre way.
IKEA sells a bookcase somewhere in the world every ten seconds which I think is wonderful. I understand the convenience of electronic books and audiobooks (and have increasingly settled for both in recent years) and one of the reasons so many of my books can be seen in the house is that I am much more likely to insist on a physical book while Liz, truly the better reader, has opted for her Kindle. It was in a physical book (That Used To Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum) that having 500 books in the home propels a child more than 3 grade levels. Right after reading that book I listened to an audiobook (Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up) which implored me to get rid of my books after I've read them. And relegate my children to remedial classes? No, thank you. Of course, it's not the books that make the difference but the presumed readers who own them. Despite what my high school self believed, the presence of books does not mean that you've read them (case in point, that Leaves of Grass which is, was and always will be mine, was only read by me last year). I am reminded that Nineteen-Eight Four, Orwell's brilliant treatise about truth in language, in the most common title people say they have read when they haven't.
So why do I keep them? It is rather selfish considering how much I love reading secondhand books and in only rare cases do I plan on reading any of them again. I'm not sure, I just can't bear to part with them. Part of you gets stuck on the pages as well, a book reminds you of the person you were when you read it. They are memories of places visited, worlds imagined and hopes created, as real as vacation photos and I won't let them go. They, to quote a book that would have me shop them out, spark joy.