When I painted the ceiling last week, I had to remove all the books to get at it and I decided it was time to replace the two shelves with one that actually fit. Radical, right?
I went to Home Depot and bought a 10’X 6” board, which I trimmed to fit. Then I painted it so it would be interesting. I had to buy new brackets, too since the old ones had been painted to match the old shelves. I’m leaving the new brackets unpainted.
Looking at decorating magazines, or watching HGTV, I’m always struck by photos of shelves with knick knacks, photos or any tchotchke-like items placed artfully there. In my life, ‘shelf’ has always been synonymous with ‘book case’ and that’s what I use them for. It took me years to realize the answer to my silent query “where do they keep all their books?” was “they don’t have any books.” This revelation was as stunning to me as learning that most American’s still use outhouses would have been.
I grew up in a house with a library. Strike that; our house had threedifferent rooms that could have been described as a library. A gorgeous, U-shaped room with walls lined with mahogany bookcases with leaded glass doors, each and every shelf crammed with books, each and every one of which my parents had read. Including the full set of the Book of Knowledge and The Encyclopedia Britannica. This was long before the internet made such collections obsolete. We used that library as a TV room, where the entire family used to cram onto the two chairs and couch to watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the Bob Newhart Show and every Olympiad together. Why we never moved the TV set to the much larger, much less used living room across the hall I don’t know. Maybe we liked watching TV on each other’s laps.
In addition to the TV room, my parents bought three book cases that were four feet wide and six feet tall, to put in the upstairs hallway. In addition to a library, our giant Victorian had a huge, open space upstairs, surrounded by six bedrooms and a bathroom. The front end of it was what would probably be referred to as a sitting room or study space. We just called it the upstairs hall. Three four foot wide, six foot tall book cases that my Mom finished to match the dark red mahogany crown molding held as many books as we could cram into them. These included our full sets of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books but our favorites were the Betsy Tacy series and the Chip Hilton series, which belongs to my brother JP. We also had all the Winnie the Pooh books and no less than three sets of the Little House on the Prairie books. We didn’t like Laura Ingalls Wilder so much but Billy’s godparents gave him a full set three Christmases in a row. I don’t think he ever read them. Compared to the Betsy/Tacy books, they’re pretty damn dull. Oh, we also loved the Great Brain series.
Then there was Dad’s office. It was a beautiful suite of rooms back behind the back stairs that had originally been the House Keeper’s rooms. The house was built during an era when people often employed live in help. For us, it was the perfect place for Dad to work. That’s right: I had a work at home Dad five decades before it became a thing. Dad was a journalist and his office, which consisted of two rooms and a full bathroom, was floor to ceiling papers, all the time. There was one built in bookcase, that equaled the beauty of the ones in the front library (TV room) but was finished in a dark oak stain, instead of red mahogany and the leaded glass windows were stained. He added a floor to ceiling set of shelves for copies of the Reader’s Digest, (which happened to be his employer) and he had a least two more free standing book cases packed with books he was either researching, reading for fun or proof reading for colleagues. Or all three.
In addition to those three rooms, every one of our bedrooms were equipped with book cases, all of which were crammed with books and nearly every room in the house had books piled up in discreet corners because we couldn’t find anywhere else to keep them. My parent’s bedroom had two or three book cases in which they kept their favorite authors and the books they were currently reading. If we wanted to read Georgette Heyer, R.F. Delderfield, James Herriot, Tom Clancy or James Michener, that’s where we looked. We were supposed to put them back when we finished and I always did.
In short, on any given day of my childhood, I feel perfectly safe in estimating that I shared a roof with at least 10,000 books. That doesn’t include magazines, of which my folks had at least ten subscriptions per month. Magazines are NOT books, no matter how glossy the pages. Oh, in addition to a free subscription to the Reader’s Digest, my folks got a copy of the Reader’s Digest condensed books every month. I count each of those as one book, even though each one contained four books between the covers.
Now, my parents entire library could fit on one kindle but it’s not the same. Reading a book is a full sensory experience and reading a kindle is simply not. I have one and yes, it’s a wonderful way to bring several books on vacation without taking up any space but given my druthers, I’ll take a big, fat, hard cover or paperback any day of the week. I love the way a real book looks, feels and smells. I like being able to flip back to re-read a page, or flip ahead to see if I want to bother finishing it. I like my collection of book marks.
A kindle is to a real book as a packet of vitamin powder is to a real meal. It may keep you alive but it doesn’t satisfy the soul.
When my parents moved into their new place, they had to cull their collection of books and I took on that job. I wanted the book cases that once lined our upstairs hall. My house doesn’t have a room big enough for all three of those cases but I put two of them in the little bedroom that now houses the grandkids’ toys and porta cribs. My dream is to have floor to ceiling shelves built into my TV room, on either side of the fire place. Then, I could consolidate all the books I’ve got all over my house or…get more books!!
Hahaha!!
The smart money says I’ll get more books.