Why Do You Have Old Books?
A wonderful guest post from the fabulous Debbie Price. Debbie is a writer, editor and former newspaper journalist. She and her husband own a creative content company and live with their daughter in downtown Dayton.
Why Do You Have Old Books?
The question brought me up short. But it was a good one.
The home stager made a beeline for the fireplace, and without so much as a by your leave, plucked two African fertility statues off the mantle.
“Why them?” I protested.
“Too distracting,” the stager said, shooting the realtor a meaningful look. She had been hired to say what would stay and what would go before the photo shoot, a prelude to listing our house for sale. Clearly, there had been a conversation in the car.
“Don’t worry about the dog kennel or the laundry on the floor or the unmade beds, just get the dudes off the mantle.”
“Right, boss.”
“Too African?” I asked, getting my back up.
“Too naked,” the realtor shot back.
The mantle, now swept clean, needed other objects for decoration.
“Something photogenic,” the stager said.
“Neutral,” the realtor translated.
“Forgettable?” I asked.
“Exactly,” the stager said, striding over to the secretary where the fragile and favorite things live. She threw open the glass doors and pulled out a few thin volumes, which she took over to the mantle and stacked with the pages facing outward.
“Oh, no, not spines in, not in this house. The titles tell you what’s in the book,” I said, sounding even to my ears like a parent explaining the concept of a book to a very small child. Picking up speed, I went off about trendy furniture stores that filled pickled-oak bookcases with stacks of degloved pages tied in twine, as though what was in the books did not matter at all.
“Desecration,” I said.
“It’s just for the photograph,” the stager said.
“I rip the covers off my books,” the realtor said, doubling down.
The stager took the books off the mantle to return them to the secretary, dissatisfied with their appearance.
Pausing, she asked, “Why do you have old books?”
In her left hand she held The Poems of Water Scott, Vol. VL, printed in 1858, the pages still clean and strong. In her right hand was Conversation at Midnight by Edna St. Vincent Millay, published in 1937, its Depression-era paper beginning to yellow and crumble.
The stager was young and pretty, somewhere north of 21 but certainly still south of 30 and stylish in jeans, short boots, and a leather jacket. She cast her eyes about the living room, taking in the bookcases (four!) and repeated the question, as if she could not understand why someone would clutter up a house with so much paper.
“Why do you have old books?”
Who thought we’d need to explain books? How could my generation have failed hers so badly?
She read my face.
“I don’t mean that in a critical way,” she said, hastily. “I just wonder when I go into houses why people have old books.”
My great-aunt owned a bookstore in the 1930s and 40s, I said. She bought copies for herself of everything she sold, and she loved to pick through second-hand stores for treasures. After she died, we kept as many of her books as we could.
“Plus,” I said pointedly, “I like to read.”
And the stager was off to put orchids in pots.
There, of course, is more to the story than that.
My great-aunt didn’t just buy and sell books. She read them. She was a feisty redhead who married late, wore diamonds and furs without apology, played poker (not bridge), and liked her bourbon neat. We called her Wawa, and when I was an awkward little bookworm, she was the one person who got me. She always wanted to know what I was reading and what I thought of it, what I liked and what I didn’t. We could go on for hours about the characters, as though they were people we actually knew. I loved her for so many reasons, not the least of which, was the way we connected through books.
Her tastes were eclectic and wide-ranging. The Texts of Taoism and The Holy Qur’an and The Teachings of Buddha shared shelf space with The Bible (King James version) and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Books by and about Charles Darwin, Rear Admiral Richard Byrd (signed and coffee stained), Albert Schweitzer, Leo Tolstoy, W.E.B. Du Bois, Shakespeare, Leonardo DaVinci (notes in the margin), Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Jefferson flanked stacks of paperbacks, including Barbara Walter’s How to Talk with Practically Anybody about Practically Anything and Jane Fonda’s 1981 Workout Book, bought when my great-aunt was 78 years old.
“I want to be with it,” she would say, as if any explanation were needed.
Wawa had a habit of leaving notes, postcards, and photographs between the pages. More than 30 years after her death, I find them still and almost always when I need them most.
Once, when I was blocked and about to give up on a project, I decided, inexplicably, to reorganize the bookshelves. Call it procrastination, which it was, but what is important here is that I felt compelled to move the books, rather than, say, clean out the pantry. I dropped Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and a note in Wawa’s tidy handwriting fluttered out. She had copied a quote from the orchestra conductor and pianist Antonia Brico.
I recognized the quote from an article I had written about Ms. Brico for my college newspaper. At the press opp with the composer, I could barely speak I was so intimidated by the professional journalists, who chatted knowledgeably with the conductor about important musical things.
One of the music critics rolled his eyes and snorted audibly when I finally stammered my question: “What advice would you give to someone starting out in the world today?”
We were seated in a circle. Antonia Brico shot the man a look, reached over, took my hand, and said, “Don’t ask people what you should be or what you should do. Trust yourself. Find your way and stick with it. The heart is still the best Geiger counter of all for finding our way in life. Listen to it & trust it & you can’t go wrong.”
I felt like she was talking to me and me alone.
I must have sent the article to Wawa, but I don’t remember discussing it with her. I certainly didn’t expect to find Antonia Brico’s quote in Death Comes for the Archbishop on a dreary winter day decades later. Willa Cather also wrote My Antonia, so it makes complete sense to me that Wawa would stick a quote from one Antonia into a book by an author who wrote about another Antonia. But for me to find on that afternoon when I so needed to read those words, well, there is magic in that.
Why do you have old books?
I suppose that is a legitimate question when an 8GB Kindle can hold 6,000 eBooks. But look at a Kindle and what do you see? I have a nice leather cover on mine that offers no clue to what’s inside. The Kindle on my nightstand stirs no memories, evokes no emotion. The device is a convenient way to read, but unlike the bookcases and secretary, it holds no messages from my dead.
In the secretary, along with the Scott and St. Vincent Millay poems, is my grandmother’s petite pocket hymnal. The tiny book, barely larger than a double pack of gum, was a Christmas gift from her mother, inscribed and dated December 24, 1941. I can imagine my grandmother carrying it for comfort in those dark and desperate weeks after Pearl Harbor was bombed, as boys all around, including her older son, were preparing to ship out to fight in Europe and the Pacific.
The Words of Josephus, a heavy, well-worn 19th Century volume, belonged to Rabbi Alexander Kline. His widow, Eleanor, gave the book to my mother after Rabbi’s death. “Don’t let Josephus get away,” my mother told me, not long before her own death. Rabbi Kline taught art history classes at the Texas Tech University museum where my mother met him. On that dusty West Texas plain, my mother was starving to learn. Rabbi and Eleanor Kline recognized and nurtured her intellect, becoming not only mentors but also dear friends. The morning of the estate sale I awoke at 3 a.m. with the awful realization that I didn’t have Josephus and rushed over to my parents’ house before sunrise to retrieve it.
In the secretary next to Josephus is a small leather-bound Bible in two volumes, Old and New Testaments, each inscribed in flowing script, Katherine Blackburn, July the 15th, 1776. Did Katherine Blackburn understand the magnitude of what those men in Philadelphia had just done?
My husband and I have done our own share of book buying, oversized photo books, best sellers hot off the press, biographies, how-tos, art books, history books, science and sociology, and two entire shelves of works authored by our friends. Each title tells a story and reminds me of not only what is between the pages, but also where I was, what I was doing, how I felt when that particular book came into my life.
Why do you have old books?
I never doubted the value of books, old or new, until the stager came into our house. Her question smacked me in the face with its implication that bound books are obsolete, undesirable even, and at best, useful only as decor. I ruminated for days as I packed boxes of books to keep and boxes to give away, alternately furious and depressed.
And then came Covid.
The stager and my outrage belong to The Time Before when the coming pandemic was just a whisper. Before lockdowns and mask mandates, before closed schools and shuttered churches, cancelled concerts and emptied office buildings. Before economies faltered and unemployment soared. Before travel bans and holidays without family. Before having a meal or a drink with friends could kill you. Before millions died and more than 100 million were infected by this novel coronavirus.
Before our cities convulsed in justified rage over the deaths of George Floyd, Brianna Taylor. Before artfully woven conspiracy theories and lies challenged a free and fair election. Before a sitting president incited a mob to attack the Capitol. Before the existential threats to our democracy, to our very lives became so real.
In the midst of so much suffering and death, it might seem frivolous to worry about old books or people who don’t value them. So much ballast. So much weight. And yet, books — especially old books — are just what we need in times like these. Simply by virtue of their physical heft and their ability to survive through the centuries, old books impart a perspective that bits and bytes cannot. What’s inside a book is, of course, the most important thing. But to hold a 1776 Bible or a 162-year-old book of poetry is to know that others before you held this very same book, read it, learned from it, cherished it, that they, too, lived in difficult and dangerous times, that their lives have lessons for us, even in this digital age.
We built shelves in the new townhouse to hold our books and treasures, the African fertility statues among them. From where I sit typing, I scan the titles — Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia, William Manchester’s Death of a President, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove, Brian Stevenson’s Just Mercy. I am reminded that the success of our nation has never been assured, that justice has always been hard won, that we have survived times even worse than these.
I found our daughter perusing the bookshelves and suggested Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, a brilliant work inspired by the true story of a 17th Century English village that quarantined itself to try to stop the spread of the Black Death. I read Brooks’ novel in September 2001, little knowing when I began it how much it would help me through the terrible weeks after 9/11.
“I don’t want to read about a plague in the middle of a pandemic,” my daughter said, opening the book to scan the inside flap of the dust jacket.
“Oh, but you should,” I said.
She took the book reluctantly and returned it the next morning, having stayed up half the night to finish it.
“I loved it,” she said. “What else do you have?”
And off we went to see what gifts we could find in the old books.
