By Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:
MOVING BOOKS
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died in 1994 and I still remember the news clip when John F. Kennedy Jr. announced her death. He said, “My mother died surrounded by her friends and her family and her books… .”
When we die, we all want to be encircled by people we love, but I thought it was great that books also lent her some comfort.
I imagine most of us have favorite things that raise our spirits and make us feel good just by being around them.
Someone else might feel this sort of attachment to a tackle box loaded with favorite fishing lures, or to a classic car he or she has restored, or maybe to a sewing machine with which a person has spent countless creative hours.
Like Jackie O., my life has been enhanced by books – books that have deepened my thinking, inspired me, told me a story, or changed the direction of my life. My books fill me with joy. Seeing them all together makes me want to burst into song even though I’m not a fan of musicals.
A bunch of these books have been boxed and moved a half-dozen times. And like me, many are showing their age, but these books have been there for me through warm seasons and cold.
On a recent weekend, Dave and I did some minor rearranging in our house. A table and two bookshelves were moved, which gave me the chance to handle my treasured books, one by one.
When we purchased this house, we liked the spaciousness of an open room and kept large furniture to a minimum. And although furniture eventually took over, I never put a bookcase in the living room where I needed one the most – near my reading chair and my writing desk.
On the Saturday of our furniture rearrangement, a bookcase from Dave’s office went into the hallway and the bookcase that had been in the hall settled next to my reading chair. A hundred books are now within my reach.
Although it would’ve been great to order them by genre, I ended up shelving books according to fondness and use. The ones I grab most often, the ones I use for inspiration and for reference stay in the living room. The second tier of books was placed in the hallway. And books that I pull only occasionally went into a bedroom bookcase.
The process gave me the chance to see each of these old friends again. While they’ve all been visible, in plain sight, I hadn’t actually laid hands on some of them for a while.
As I held these books, I ran my hand over their covers. Each book has a back-story of where it came from, why I bought it, and how it has either charmed me or informed me.
While a novel takes me to another place, a non-fiction book can be like an intense dialogue. A memoir allows me to step into the life of another, to see how that person has navigated the world.
People might suggest that I could save myself from these space-consuming bookcases by purchasing a Kindle or similar electronic reading device.
Please don’t make me use a Kindle. Now I imagine it would be convenient and cost-efficient, but I love books. I love standing in bookstores, seeing and touching the merchandise, and turning a book over to read the reviews on its back cover.
Books are more than content, more than just words. Form is important, too. There’s an emotional rush when I spot the book I want, grab its spine from the shelf, admire the cover art, hold the book, and turn actual pages. I like the feel of paper between my fingers.
Bookshelves make a colorful splash; they fill a room with life and with stories. But in a few generations, books will have gone the way of vinyl, cassettes, and soon, CDs; books will someday be published only in electronic format. Publishing is taking some drastic turns, but I shall hang on to my colorful clutter of books.
Like Jackie Onassis, I think it would comfort me to be surrounded with my books when I die. And now that I’ve said that, I might be setting myself up to be killed by a falling bookcase – but, I suppose there are worse ways to go.
Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh
Love this! You took the words about books out of my mouth!!!! LOVE books…and I have my own library! Love looking at them, holding them, their smells, love it all! I LOVE MY BOOKS TOO! Thanks for the great article!
I love this column. Cheryl Unruh has captured the way in which books are magical talismans, more than cardboard and paper. I think Jacqueline Onassis would have read this essay and agreed 100%.
I will always love books but I can see the utility of a Kindle as well, for certain situations. If I am ever hospitalized and have time to read before I’m kicked out, it would be nice to have a lot of choices on a tiny little gadget. Also much easier to read from a hospital bed, I imagine.
I’m not sure books will disappear entirely. There are still aficionados who have turntables, even reel-to-reel tape machines. There are those who write with fountain pens, or shave with straight razors. I’m thinking my books may be a treasure trove someday, worth far more than what I paid for most of them, at least those of a sufficient quality not to yellow and crumble away…
Hi – I just read this piece and had to comment with an excerpt from my upcoming book, The Eternal Waltz of Jacqueline Kennedy. I would be honored if you would consider reading the book and placing it on your living room shelf!
… A string of endless dreary days become a hoping of tomorrow as I loose myself in a city full of other people’s books. It is in these strangers’ words and ample sought out wisdom, their vast poetic space, that I finally find the wind and water to carry me from this place. I catch this current of human prose as I motor along the city’s streets. I simply try to disappear in the cresting surging waves, as white-capped people follow currents down crowded sweeping streets. I ride the tide of exhaled breath and crashing deafening verse, that washes over the well worn shore with humanity’s own pounding graphite surf…
I’m different. I have so many books that are important to me. Now some have a nostalgic quality for my appreciation from my past. I tend toward non-fiction. I mourn many books I no longer have because I loaned them and cannot remember who has/had them now/then. I will always have books. Indexes rock! I have more books not read than those I have read. Now, I rarely read but I still buy books. I use the internet practically cross-referencing.
I HAVE read some of my fiction novels several times. I never really read as a child. I found Ian Flemming in HS. In college I moved to an immersion in vintage pop culture of the 20th century. Then I focused on studio-era Hollywood history. Stephen King for a while when he was primal. Artisan coffee table fare like Faberge, Tiffany, Maxfield Parrish, Arts & Crafts design, some gardening reference books, recently all things William Allen White. I’m cycling out of WAW now.
Lately I have consumed the writing of Cheryl Unruh and Beverley Buller and I like this.
Make that indices.