The Bookshelves Upstairs

“It was a pleasant little room, with three windows, north, west, and south, and bookshelves crowded with books and scientific publications, and a broad writing-table,...” H. G. Wells

Our loft is also a pleasant little room, with two dormer windows, east and west. And now my husband has added varnished-pine bookshelves within the nooks and crannies created by the slope of the roof. With this addition, I’ve been able to group our eclectic collection of books by subject matter. Of course, the three bookcases downstairs are still full, but I have also reorganized them by subject. Likewise, the six book groupings already established with bookends on top of chests remain.

Ten years ago, we had only three weeks to pack and move after we sold our house. My husband spent most of that time at the coast working on our present house. I was still working long hours at school as we created yet another yearbook, and so, I packed boxes late at night and early morning. Because of the time constraints, I didn’t stop to cull and sort.

As we have whittled down the amount of furniture which had filled our much larger house to those pieces we really like and that work well in our smaller home, we’ve also shifted piles of books from tabletops to closets and back. But no more.

The days that I’ve spent gathering the books upstairs, sorting them by subject, and lining them on the easy-to-reach shelves have been like a treasure hunt, a birthday party, Christmas Day and a trip to the candy store all rolled into one. Although I had packed, shuffled and even hunted out some of these volumes through the years, I have now rediscovered favorite books long forgotten. It took every bit of will power not to sit down right then, right there and start reading. Even my husband, that first week, picked up and read two small volumes of his, one about fishing and one about his mother’s family.

The first of these books that I plan to read is one of the very few books my grandmother ever owned in addition to her two Bibles, an old King James Version and a much newer The Living Bible, both now in my collection of Bibles. Today’s Children, copyrighted 1937, is a novel based on a long running radio soap opera before I was born. Evidently, the characters in the book are the same ones as those on the radio program. As I shelved this book, I reread the note about my grandmother that my mother had tucked in the pages when she passed it along to me. In her later life, my grandmother talked about the characters in her soap operas as if they were real people. To her, they were because they visited five days a week.

I grouped my mother’s high school British and American anthologies with those I acquired from college classes and teaching. When my parents attended school, they had to buy their own textbooks. I also have a couple of texts that I had to buy for high school; one of which, Myths and Their Meanings, by Max Herzberg, was the text I selected for the twelve-week unit I taught my freshman honors classes. The school system was able to purchase a much later edition of this book, with color pictures of artwork inspired by the classical myths. I love the concept of this little book because it focuses on how authors through the ages have alluded to these ancient stories which attempt to explain the mysteries of life.

The longest shelf now houses yearbooks, starting with my parents’ yearbooks from Sunset High, also my alma mater. My dad was in the first class to graduate from this school built on the “western horizon” of Dallas. Today, this facility, registered on the historical record, now sits in the middle of a major Dallas suburb. Next in line are my high school and college yearbooks, followed by Bob’s. However, the bulk of this shelf is filled with Wayne County High Jackets, both those I advised and those given me by later advisers.

In addition to rereading many of these now shelved books, I’ve now set a new task for myself. Like my mother did with my grandmother’s book, I want to inscribe some of the books with notes about as much of their history as I know. A book so often tells more stories than just the one written on its pages.

With all of our books now organized and shelved, I hope our grandchildren will view me much as Katharine Swan did her grandmother. In Born of Books: How Mom Made Me the Bookworm I Am, Swan writes, “One of my earliest book-related memories is, oddly enough, of the stairs leading up to the third floor in my grandmother's house. Despite (or perhaps because of) my grandmother's love of books, there were never enough bookshelves in that house. There were several in the third-floor playroom. So, when books needed to be taken upstairs, they were often left in little stacks against the wall on the far right side of each step. My memories of those stacks of books have become intertwined with my memories of my grandmother, and represent some of the earliest examples of what made me a reader.”

Read on...

2009