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The Return of the Lost Library
Morgan at Gnosis in his post Of a saying of a Caesar spoke, among other things, of his books and his compulsion to acquire more and more books. He has inspired me to relate this story of a lost and found library.
My wife, stepspawn, and I spent xmas night of 1999 at my dad and stepmonster's new house in Oklahoma City; we were in fact the first overnight guests (the prodigal returns). The place is a palace, which dad got for a song because he paid for it in cash. He laid $155,000 on the barrelhead for it, but this would be a 350 or 400 thou property (at least) in Denver. To give you some idea of the scale, the bathroom off the master bedroom (the bathroom, not the bedroom itself) is bigger than an entire studio apartment where I once lived. The wing containing their office, guest bedroom and guest bathroom is bigger than our entire house. My stepmonster is a devotee of the cable home decorating queen Christopher Lambert and now that she has the lebensraum she has been on a blitzkrieg of gracious living that would do Uberhausfrau Martha Stewart proud. Elspeth and I slept (well, part of the night) on 320 thread count sheets in a princess pea bed that has so much mattress on it that it stands waist high.
The most interesting part of xmas, for me anyway, came the day after. Dad and I were sitting in easy chairs in his study/den, sipping our morning coffee. The place has lots of windows, and I was frankly checking out the appointments in daylight. The room had lovely built-in bookcases, on which my stepmonster had queenfully arranged various objets d'art, chatkas, and yes, books. What you must understand is that neither my father nor stepmonster read. Well, my dad reads the local Daily Fascist everyday, and the stepmonster might occasionally peruse a book on investment or interior decorating, but they never, ever read a book for pleasure. Well, I'm looking at this bookcase and I take in the title on a spine--Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire. I think, I wonder where she got that, I used to read alot of Nabokov. Then I see an American 1st ed. of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. I think, hell, I used to own that. I spot Lord Rochester's Monkey by Graham Greene. I used to own that. I get up and walk to the bookcase. Every book on it was a book I had owned and left behind in Oklahoma when I came to Denver and had thought was lost. When I departed OKC for Denver I arrived at Stapleton Airport with three suitcases. I left behind a ramshackle house full of my discarded possessions and maybe as many as 3000 books. Some of the books I sold or gave away, many of them I left lying in the half wrecked "Castle Dolorius" as my friend Rob christened it (Rob scavenged and sold many of the books I abandoned), and the ones I most valued I packed and stored at another friend, Steve’s house, along with some other possessions, meaning to come back for them when I was able. Steve sometime in '87 brought some of the books to me on a visit to Denver, but when he was divorced he lost his house and I got the impression that the rest of my stuff was lost in that debacle. So. I'm looking at my long lost books deployed as accents in my stepmonster's decorating scheme, and I turn to dad and pop the question. Dad says, I'm sure I told you before. Told me what, I enquired. Steve's mom had called dad up 4 or 5 years ago to tell him that she had 8 or so boxes of my books and did he want 'em, otherwise she was putting them in the trash. Dad (thank you, dad) did pick them up. Said boxes sat in a corner of the warehouse of his business gathering dust until my stepmonster rummaged through a couple to populate her new bookshelves. Incidentally, I have no memory of dad ever mentioning any of this to me. By this time I am becoming seriously excited. It is all I can do to restrain myself from snatching all of the books off my stepmonster's shelves and to my bosom.
Dad offers to take me over to the warehouse, and after breakfast, he and Els and I drive over there. Dad leads us past piles of satellite dishes and other electronic gadgetry to a pile of moldering cardboard boxes and the reunion begins. I unpack books and caress them and introduce them by name and provenance and do the happy dance in a cloud of dust and allergens as Dad and Els look on and sneeze. My Milton, my Blake, my Lovecraft, my Philip K. Dick Ace paperbacks, my Mencken, my For Whom the Bell Tolls 1st, my Grove Press Henry Miller's, my Georg Grosz Ecce Homo, my 1892 deathbed ed. of Leaves of Grass, etc., etc., etc. I repacked boxes and put as many as I could get in the car, tho' Elspeth wouldn't let me dump the girls or even the xmas presents. I had to make a separate road trip to OKC for the rest. The funniest thing of all was that two twenty dollar bills (dated 1977 and 1982) fell out of one of the books as I was going through them. When the stepmonster heard that I could see in her eyes that as soon as we departed she was going to go on a treasure hunt through every book I had to leave behind. Leila, my younger stepspawn, bless her avaricious little heart, flipped through every last one I brought home.
I let my stepmonster keep the books upon her shelves (tho’ I covet them as well) as a karmic tithe of sorts for the rescue and storage of my treasured tomes. After all, if she hadn't dug a few out to grace her empty bookcase, I wouldn't have been fondling and chortling over the rest.
One box I brought home was full of old papers, notebooks, bundles of old correspondence, and old photos. Rob and I went through this particular carton the one night, in an orgy of nostalgia for the bad old days, while Elspeth looked on in considerable bemusement.
As I wrote in Morgan’s comments box, bibliophilia does shade into bibliomania before you know it. Real Live Preacher in his comment said: “I have the same book compulsion, Morgan. The same one and it carries the same danger. Recently I got rid of them all. Not my "work" books which are at church, but the vast library of books I've been hauling around. Now, if I want a book, I buy a copy, read it and get rid of it. I can't explain why, but this has been an important part of my personal growth. I think I'm moving from collecting to living.” Leaving most of my books (and other possessions) behind was a liberation of sorts, just as the cliche' says, I felt like I had laid down a great weight I didn't know I was carrying. Being a stranger in a strange land (Denver) was part of it; as physicist Leo Szilard said, you must "go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become." Books are friends with long memories. But I came back to my home state, Oklahoma, got married, and unexpectedly recovered part of the library I thought lost. This event released something in me, my inner bookmonster I guess, and in the throes of renewed bibliomania I have since acquired so many additional books (more than I can possibly read in twenty years if I did nothing else) that I could open a used book store or stock a branch library. I must be moving from living to collecting.
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