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In my home, I cherish many
places. My bedroom is for rest and fantasies of
the night; my bathroom, to cleanse and refresh
my exercised body; my garage, to repair and
create all that is mechanical; and my kitchen,
to prepare gastronomic delights. However, there
is a door to a room with an aging page, printed
in color with large, bold type. Proudly, I have
taped this sign to the upper third of the door,
which states, "No food or drink allowed in
here!" This is the one room, in which I take
the most pride, my athenaeum, where I keep my
books. Some call it a library. Others have
reduced it to a shelf or two, and the indulgent
devote an entire room to the very purpose of
storing books. Nevertheless, in my mind, this
place is my university, teacher and mentor,
philosopher and interpreter, sage and friend.
Silent icons of history, science, and dreams
are the books I own.
Thirty-five years ago, or
more, when I was young, I started gathering
books. I started with storybooks having
pictures and type so large that one could view
them from across the room. Growing older, I
collected classics of fairy tales, and young
reader titles, such as The Boxcar Children, The
Outsiders, and The Hardy Boys. All of these
children's stories helped me learn to read.
These shelves accommodate The Encyclopedia of
Britannica, twenty three to a set; The Books Of
Knowledge, twenty plus in all; and Popular
Mechanics: Do-It-Yourself Encyclopedia, to
repair all that may break, and the yearbooks
from all my high schools. The walls, eleven
feet wide and seven feet tall, are filled with
books on gardening and herbs, health and
fitness, finance and business, philosophy and
religion, occultism and mysticism. There are
more reference books to serve me. I am
constantly using thesauri and dictionaries for
rhyming and slang. The guides for erotica,
grammar, bad spelling, structure, scenes, and
limericks help me to write in muse. Technical
reference for my computer take a shelf or two,
WordPerfect, Dos6, AutoCAD, and OS/2, ProComm
Plus, Visual Basic3, dBase IV, Corel Draw to
name a few. How can I leave out the Modem
Reference, Quicken, Framework, Where is Carmen
San Diego, Bryce2, NASCAR Racing, and clip art
volumes? Hardware and software manuals are
constantly in use. Moreover, what of the
fiction? Those titles seem countless in number,
yet they include authors like John Grisham,
Dean Koontz, Jackie Collins, Steven King, James
Mitchener, Michael Crichton, Nelson De Mille,
and Robert Ludlum standing out in groups
clustered shoulder to shoulder. Binders of
photographs from over the years contain
pictures I have taken that tell my life story.
There is classic art of Monte and Da Vinci.
More currently collected, is the art of Escher
and Klimt, and my modern day favorites are
Goldsworty and Archer. Included among these is
a volume of drawings I have done. Articles from
magazines an issue or two, school texts of
physics, math, geometry, floriculture, and
propagation I have kept to review.
On some of the
shelves, I keep items that are not books or
reference, but memorabilia. Atop one dusty
shelf rests a weathered leather top hat, given
by a friend. There are other memories that I
have accumulated; a small bottle containing
parts of a colorful green beetle, bottle caps,
a short string of jute, and what looked like
half of a peanut, that I collected from
cleaning my weed. There is a stack of hard
drives for my computer, which my cousin, Kurt,
had given me. Binders of books on tape like of
Napoleon Hill’s classic Think and Grow Rich,
How to Listen Powerfully, Do It Now!, and other
take a small space on the shelf. Occupying a
shelf or two include a packing tape dispenser,
laundry soap, cleansers, polishes, batteries
and other Amway products that I store for sale.
These oddities are remnants of a business that
has fallen by the wayside to the more important
necessities of family and job.
I spend hours in
the place that I have come to call ‘my
athenaeum’, my refuge from the sometimes
tedious grind of life. Daily, the search for a
particular book to benefit the task at hand
leads me through the pressures of the world. So
many familiar faces of titles standing ready
for my call, spine out for saving space, I know
them all. Here, represented on my shelves are
books in all shapes, thick and thin, short and
tall, wide and narrow. I can vouch for most of
these volumes, but I borrowed some many years
before. Their owners are widespread across this
county, the USA, reminders of countless moves.
From time to time, friends ask, "Do you have
this book" Thinking of the title in question, I
will say, "I know, just let me look". As if a
photographic memory had come to life, my eyes
scan their faces one by one for clues that tell
me this is the one.
In contrast to
all the others books on my shelf, shiny, glossy
surfaces depict newly acquired books. In
contrast, the bleached, sun-faded editions
quietly remain next to their cousins, aunts,
and uncles. These relatives, I refer to as,
‘Used books,’ or older editions, as some call
them, though I prefer the term ‘Old friends.’
Regrettably, I lack the time to clean the years
of dust from these shelves of books. I am not
sure how this grunge may draw the life from the
delicate page edges. My only hope is that their
spirit may endure such negligence on my part.
Yet, there is a thrill as I occasionally
stumble upon a book that I had forgotten I had,
while searching for another. Yes, it is the
reminder of a forgotten book, tightly squeezed
between larger ones that halts my progress.
Carefully I pull the top of its spine toward
me, to get a better grip and remove it from the
shelf. The snap or cracking sound as I break
the aged sticky bond from it’s neighbors, tells
me that it has been a very long time since I
held it in my hands. Like the slight squeezing
a bottle of fragrant perfume, the book
permeates the air with the scent of time,
seasoned paper, and binding aromas. My mind
drifts bringing memories long forgotten of the
last time I used this once familiar
friend.
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