The Poetry of Owning Books
By Dian Parker
I own so many books that my husband has to keep building more bookshelves. He’s outside right now in the cold, sawing and hammering. It’s five degrees in Vermont with snow on the ground, but he never complains. When he comes in, I’ll make him an Irish Coffee with an extra shot of whiskey.
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In the small study where I’m writing this, I have five bookshelves and need at least two more. My problem is that I need to have a physical book – one that I own. Not a library book. Not a virtual book. Reading online causes me to skim and skip ruthlessly. There’s just so much information every day piling up in my inbox, outbox, out of town box, trash box, brain box. I want the book in my hands. Hard or soft cover, it doesn’t matter, as long as it is mine and I own it.
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Taking care of a three-year-old means constantly telling him not to throw his, mine, any books around. Like any other three-year-old, he rips the covers and bends the pages, leaving the books nearly impossible to read. “They’re precious,” I keep telling him. “Someone took a long time to write the words and paint the pictures. See how somebody bound them up in this nice cover? Not only that,” I insist, “books are meant to last forever. For your whole life!” How can I expect him to understand any of this when he can’t even remember what he has for breakfast half an hour before he comes over to my house?
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Books are for the ages. A well written book with a compelling story, like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, have traveled with me for decades, through every move ‒ New York to Chicago to London to Ireland to San Francisco to Seattle, and to Vermont where I now live.
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Books are time travelers. I only have to pick up one of my books and I remember when I first read it. Jean Giono’s Joy of Man’s Desiring I read on my friend’s deck in Anacortes, Washington, overlooking the San Juan Islands (where I would years later meet my husband).
My friend had read Giono’s book in French and said it had always been one of her favorites. I went to the tiny library in her town and they had an old hardcover copy in English. I read its 500 pages in three days. Because I needed to own that book, I looked for a used copy for years, but none of the booksellers I went to had ever heard of it. Some had never even heard of the author. Finally, I found a copy in Powell’s mile-long used bookstore in Portland, Oregon. The book had a photograph of the author on the cover – a handsome man sipping wine in a small glass at a café table with a pipe held between smiling lips. I was hooked.
To this day, I’m so in love with his books and his face that every time I go to a bookstore the first thing I look for is one of Giono’s books. There aren’t many of his fifty books translated into English, but I have all of them. An ex-boyfriend bought me the first edition of one of Giono’s books, Hill of Destiny, in hardcover. Thirty years later, it remains one of my most prized possessions. Sometimes I carry it around in my purse. Published in 1929 in Paris, the cover is a woodblock print. Painted in brown and red, it shows a solitary man shooting a boar, with red fire flaring out the muzzle of his long rifle. In the background, a burning red hill is ablaze in flames, with little figures below running around, their arms in the air and mouths wide open, screaming. I also found a second printing of Giono’s Song of the World published in 1937 (first printing in 1934). This cover is a yellow, blue, and black painting of a man and woman with two children on a raft traveling down a wide sweeping river surrounded by lush trees. The forest wraps around the spine of the book with the image in reverse on the back.
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These books are works of art. I am a painter as well as a writer, and I appreciate the effort, creativity, and care that went into making these old books. When I was a kid, my parents had two hardbound copies with woodblock prints of the Brontë sisters’s Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. I read both under the covers by flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep. Those books transported me to the windswept moors and dark nights of England, where love meant death because it was so powerful. I still think of their heavy green covers with, I seem to remember from my teenage frenzy, a man and woman locked in a fierce embrace, the wind tearing through her long green dress and luscious black hair. But after all these many years, maybe I’m mistaking that image for the black and white film with Laurence Olivier and Vivian Lee, which I also adored. In any case, I would love to have those two books now. I’d carry them around with me like an expensive handbag.
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I love books more than I love people – almost. I adore my husband, and, most of the time, my three brothers. I love both my parents, but they’re dead now. I have some close friends but we’re separated by distance so it’s not the same as when we worked and traveled together.
Since the pandemic, my relationship with books has grown ever more intense. I am devoted to them and rarely lend them out. People always take too long reading the books I’ve lent them. I miss those books on my shelves, all tucked in safely. I’ve stopped lending books to my brother who lives near me because he and his wife read the books in the bathtub and return them wrinkled. When I say anything about it, they say, “they’re only books.” Only books! Far too often I have to hound people to get back the books I’ve lent them. Right now I’ve got some at a good friend’s house, and she’s had them an awfully long time. Five books! I asked if she’d read them yet, and she said she’d read them all and was thrilled with all of them, but she was going away for ten days and would have to return them when she was back. “Why? Do you need them back?” I said no. It’s fine. Return them when you can. But it really wasn’t fine with me. Not at all. How can I explain that it won’t be fine until they’re tucked back in my room in their rightful place on my shelf.
Authors can spend sometimes years crafting just the right sentence, agonizing over comma use and word choice, what to keep and what to delete. I’ve spent days fretting over sentences and paragraphs. Should a comma be inserted here, or a section break there? To italicize or not, and the dreaded exclamation point I try never to use (even though I’ve used it three times here). So to hold a well written book in my hands, like Dickens’ “David Copperfield” or Nabokov’s “Speak Memory,” is to hold a rare jewel. It’s to recognise the labor that has gone into its conception.And to have these books in a beautiful hardcover edition is as rare and joyous as seeing a hairy mammoth in my backyard.
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I often purchase books according to their cover. I’ve searched high and low for Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the original cover. I found one on eBay, but when it came it was not the cover they had shown so I sent it back. I discovered Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” at a library book sale in a tiny town in Vermont, and was magnetized by the cover – a copy of Male Model by Henri Matisse set against a jet-black background with an arrow of cerulean blue at the top. I recently purchased “Nature’s Palette: A Color Reference System from the Natural World.” The book is large and hardbound, with gold lettering for the title. On the cover are twelve inlaid squares in various colors, with accompanying squares showing birds, flowers, and minerals in corresponding colors. The cover is like a 3D object of art.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Clothing of Books speaks of the necessity for a good cover. She writes, “a bad cover is like an enemy; I find it hateful. There is an awful cover for one of my books that elicits in me an almost violent response. Every time I am asked to autograph that edition, I feel the impulse to rip the cover off the book.” She goes on to say that if she were to select the covers for her own books, it would be a still life by Morandi or a collage by Matisse. Book covers are works of art, just as books are works of art and writing books is a work of art. I’ve been writing a book for the last three years but keep getting sidetracked reading other books. Right now I’m ensconced in 2666 by Roberto Bolaño and Benjamin Labatut’s, When We Cease to Understand the World. Both are Chilean novelists and both wind me in a mysterious spell as I read. Bolaño is dead (2666 was his last book) but Labatut is very much alive, and gorgeous I might add. I’ve watched his interviews on YouTube and he's adamant about rejecting self-expression as tedious and uninteresting. A number of memoirs can be tedious so I usually avoid reading and owning them, except for Patti Smith. My twenties were similar to hers in New York: dirt poor, gay boyfriends, sleazy apartments, daredevil clubs. And she writes about books a lot and loves the same ones I do, like Murakami and 2666 and Rimbaud’s poetry.
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One of the reasons I own so many books is because when I fall in love with a book, I want to read all the books that particular author has written, as is the case with Labatut and Giono (unfortunately, not all of the books they wrote have been translated into English, which is terribly frustrating). I’ve tried to read Giono in his original French but spend too much time looking up words. I regret not having mastered languages like French, Italian, or Spanish. I find that English has no song or poetry in it, not to mention all those crazy heteronyms that must drive non-speakers cross-eyed.
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At the beginning of COVID, I decided to organize my books. I’d never done that before, mostly because I’ve moved so many times, but I’ve been in my current house for fifteen years now, longer than any other place in my life. I knew someone who had organized their books according to the color of the spines, but that seemed unliterary (though aesthetically appealing). I found a loose way to organize books that worked. I’ve placed all the women writers together, and the classics together. Books on writing are on one shelf, with dictionaries and thesauruses nearby. My journals take up an entire shelf. My art books, books by artists, and the color books are all together in one bookshelf. I’ve written for a number of art publications in the last few years and museums often send me hardcover catalogs of the exhibition I’m writing about. These books are large and heavy and my art bookshelf is sagging under the weight, but I love looking at their spines: Matisse, Cezanne, Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, Woman Abstract Expressionists, Morandi. Seeing those books reminds me of all the articles I’ve written, all the paintings I’ve seen, and all the exhibits I’m longing to see.
My very, very special books that I reread over and over have their very own bookcase, which used to be my grandmother’s. It’s tall and made from a dark burnished wood, with an arched top. Here are the Giono, Bowles, St. Exupéry, and Virginia Woolf titles. I am craving Woolf’s diaries, all five volumes. A friend in Montreal has them all and has never read them. I’m anxious to see if she really wants to keep them any longer but I know her husband gifted them to her years ago. Books should be read or else given to someone who will read them.
Another bookcase has poetry books on one shelf, essays on another, and quantum physics books on a third. Books I haven’t yet read take up only one shelf. I have five different editions of “Moby Dick” and Giono’s “The Man Who Planted Trees.” The woodcuts in some of them are gorgeous, matching the gorgeous writing. I’m proud that most of the books in the room I’ve read. The ones I haven’t, I’ll probably never get to because I prefer to reread the ones I love.
I also have books in the kitchen: cookbooks, natural healing manuals, canning books, hiking trails, quiet water books for canoeing and kayaking, Audubon books on spiders, insects, butterflies, birds, wild plants, trees, and wildflowers, and travel books on Morocco, Las Vegas, Costa Rica, Canary Islands, Amsterdam – all places we’ve traveled to in the past. We even have shelves of books in our bedroom closet because there’s no more wall space left for a bookshelf.
This way of organizing my books worked for the first few months but then I ran out of room and had to squeeze in books where I could. Even though my husband is building me another book shelf as we speak, our house is small, plus the living and dining area all have slanted walls from originally being an A frame, so really there’s nowhere to put another bookshelf. Maybe I could squeeze one into the study where I write this, keep all our clothes, and lay down a mattress on the floor for guests, but really there’s no more room. I have no idea where we'll put the new bookcase but I’m determined to have it. Maybe I could fit the new bookshelf my husband is currently building in our small bathroom, but I already know it won’t fit. Maybe I’ll knock out a wall or two.
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I practice yoga in the study five days a week. I love doing the triangle or the bridge posture while staring at my books. I contemplate how I’d like to read this or that one again. I can remember clearly when I first read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha on the train to Brighton to see an old boyfriend. Or watching my very first boyfriend in high school reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer on the bus. Or the boyfriend in London who I first saw sitting on a bench reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, his long legs crossed, light green corduroy pants, no socks, fine kid-leather loafers, the book open on his lap, immersed in reading. I didn’t even look up at his face. I just looked at that book, now one of my favorites, and his elegant crossed sockless legs and I was hooked. In love and ready for the windswept moors with him. In the end, he caused me much melancholy.
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Ever since the pandemic, I’ve been earnestly trying to avoid reading online which, I feel, leads to scanned thinking. Books require long thought. If they are well written and explore large ideas, books require deep thought, and often, rereading. It’s the least I can do for an author that has spent years writing the book.
I’m trying hard not to buy any more books. I go to our local library and check out books, but if I love it, I want to own it. Is this a compulsion? I don’t know, and to be honest, I don’t really care. Inside these books are my insides. Books travel deep, reach in deep. They are nourishing. They speak my name. And to possess a beautiful book, one with an enigmatic, powerful, artistic cover, is to hold a rare jewel. Yes, I have to possess them. Just don’t get me started on my pen collection.