Part of my housekeeping is bagging books to donate to the local library. Trouble is, we don’t have room. The house is thirty years old and has no built-in bookshelves or cabinets.  Sad to say, there’s no place to put books, and therefore, we don’t purchase many. Even the book club books come mainly from the library. And if I do buy one, I pass it on to another reader, or donate – either library or to a friend of mine who collects for prisoners – for their book clubs, believe it or not!

 I grew up in a house of books – over a thousand at one point. I counted them one summer.  And they were proudly displayed in handsome built-in bookshelves – part of the décor, part of our family.  To be fair, these were the collective books of ten people: my mom and dad, my grandmother and uncle who lived with us, and six children.  The collection, so to speak, included my father’s medical textbooks (which although containing gross illustrations of terrible diseases, made excellent places to press leaves in wax paper).  There are a few of my mom’s school books as well, including Spanish from high school, and perhaps one or two from nursing school.  Over years, we kids added textbooks of various sorts and there were multiple copies of Hamlet or To Kill a Mockingbird, hauled home from college campuses, without benefit of checking the home library.

 We had a set of encyclopedias, of course: the Encyclopedia Americana, rather than Britannica, for reasons I never found out. There were the Books of Knowledge, with lively discussions of all manner of things and a challenging separate INDEX to look them up.  Dictionary, reference books, Bible – check.  Volumes on art and mythology that Aunt Tesha sent at Christmas – a tradition I followed  for some years with my own nieces and nephews. All my mother’s mysteries, which I devoured after her, and a fairly complete row of the Nancy Drew mysteries with their yellow spines for my sister and me.  My mother had been a reader of serious fiction and non-fiction until motherhood and widowhood consumed too many brain cells: James Michener and Philip Roth were on the bookshelf among other heavies.  We children had our book orders from school, every month.  Doing the math: 3 books each for 9 months is 27 books, times six children, times twelve years.  You get the picture.  Books! Books!  Books!

 They’re gone now, all those books of my childhood, scattered from move to move, and now I don’t know where. I miss them – even the boring ones: Thomas Merton or Fulton Sheen.  I liked their familiar titles, the shape and color of their bindings, their place of order and importance on a bookshelf that was made to honor them.  They were part of our family, they gave us weight, identity and I think a certain dignity. I didn’t love dusting them, but I liked looking and thinking about them, what they said to us, what they said about us.

 In my house today, we have a few shelves of paperbacks on some pretty rickety bookshelves. Yes, there is a row of my husband’s law books in the office downstairs, covered by sports equipment.   I read books continuously, but we do not collect them or possess them.  They pass through this house and on to somewhere else, guests only, no longer members of the family.