Biblio-furniture

People visiting our home are immediately struck by its dominant decorating motif: books, books, and more books. Their reactions usually divide them into two camps -- the delighted and the appalled. I wonder what the latter would think if even my furniture coordinated with my passion for books?

Big Cozy Books makes book-themed furniture for libraries and schools. I'd love to own furniture shaped like giant books, pencils, and erasers. Actually, one of the local public libraries has some of their products. But I've been too shy to actually sit on it. I'm sure the staff would look askance at a middle-aged woman sprawling out to read in the children's section.

While you're at it, also take a look at Bookshelf, a blog devoted solely to, well, bookshelves. I was particularly charmed by these shelves that not only hold books, but look quite willing help you move them from room to room. (Not that I'd actually buy them for my own house -- my criteria for bookcases is that they be strong and able to pack the greatest number of books in the least amount of linear wall space.)

Where is Edward Gorey?

I'm a fairly organized bibliophagist. Most of the books in my library are shelved by catagory. Biography is on the north wall. Literature is on the south wall. Science, philosophy and history are on the island of bookcases in the middle of the room as are the science-fiction and fantasy paperbacks. But where is Edward Gorey?

I would like to reread Amphigorey and Amphigorey Too. But where could I have shelved them?

Religion is on the west wall. Books about art and the practical arts are on the east wall. So are the books about holidays, education, etiquette, and media -- as are my collections of humor, Victoriana, and the life and works of Dr. Samuel Johnson. That's also where you'll find a shelf of Very Tall Books such as The Lorsch Gospels and The Times Atlas of the World. But where is Edward Gorey?

I know where he used to be in my old house -- upstairs on the narrow metal bookcase with other tall, illustrated books. But all the rickety metal bookcases were left behind when I moved. Where is poor Edward Gorey now?

Foreign language, the English language, reference books and books about literature are in the living room. But not Edward Gorey. He's not on the Tolkien & Lewis shelf. He's not among the housekeeping books. He's not in the kitchen with the cookbooks. And he's certainly not on the low birch bookcase in the dining room where I keep tiny books like the Loeb Library and the Oxford World Classics.

He's not upstairs with my Catholic fiction and my Victorian kid lit. He's not down in the Library Annex where I keep the children's books, the quilting books, the encyclopediae, the hardcover science fiction and the overflow hardcover science. And he's not on the hand finished alder bookcase which houses the tall, pretty books (mostly art and astronomy) along with my husband's collection of books about Oxford and the works of Patrick O'Brien.

Where, oh where is Edward Gorey?

I feel like a frustrated dragon searching through my hoard for a misplaced bit of treasure.

Well, it must be somewhere. In the meantime, I will have to settle for this charming take-off: The Trouble With Tribbles as if written by Edward Gorey.

Hidden Treasures

After mentioning Barbara Hambly's Ishmael, a superb example of fan fiction which melded Star Trek and Here Comes the Brides, the theme music for the latter kept running through my head. In order to exorcise it, I had to reread the novel. And as I did so, enjoying the author's handling of two sets of widely disparate characters as well as her skill in inserting characters from other old science fiction and western TV shows in cameo roles and walk-ons, I stumbled across one of the joys of a long standing personal library. I refer of course to the serendipitous bookmark.

The one at the left must have journeyed through several books before coming to rest in Ishmael which was published in 1985. It's a picture of Peregrine Took which I sketched in 1976 while working at Telecredit. Every morning the supervisor would hand each of us a small slip of paper on which she had written the times at which we were to take our breaks. My job consisted of taking phone calls from retailers who would feed me the driver's license number of customers who wished to pay by check. I'd enter the number into my terminal and the company's computer would approve or disapprove the transaction. The whole process seems quaintly old-fashioned now. It was mind numbing work, but I preserved my sanity by doodling whenever the pace slacked off, and many of my sketches ended up as bookmarks in the paperbacks I brought with me to read at lunch. Every now and then I still discover one in a book I'm rereading.

But I find other things too. Many years ago, on April Fools Day, our kids thought it would be a splendid joke to put humorous notes into random books in our library. I don't think they realized how long it would take for their parents to discover them all. I ran across a new one just last week while rereading Daddy-Long-Legs. Judging from the handwriting, it was done by Fillius Major, my eldest. A parental looking spider has a youthful fly in its clutches. "Bedtime for you, young man!" proclaims the dialog balloon. (Obviously, he was writing from personal experience.)

Holy cards are so commonly found in our books that I suspect they breed between the pages. Some are the funeral cards of relatives, and I try to say a prayer for the repose of that person's soul whenever I find his or her card in a book. But a few, discovered in church parking lots or inside used books I'd bought, belong to complete strangers. I try to say a prayer for them too -- because, after all, there are no strangers in the Communion of Saints.

And every now and then, in the most unexpected volumes, I find little notes written in my late husband's spidery hand: random jottings, to-do lists, sweet messages from the past.

Unpacking My Life As a Quilter

Quilting is my other passion, and it's reflected in my library. Yesterday I was unpacking my collection of Quilter's Newsletter Magazine. I have issues going back to 1970. Though I've been fascinated by quilts ever since I was very young, I was not a subscriber in those days. In fact, I had never even heard of QNM.

I discovered the magazine in the early 1990s. At that time, in response to an unhappy family event, I took one of my earlier abortive attempts at quiltmaking out of my cedar chest and sewed it together. At about the same time I discovered an online quilting community, the Online Quilters, through Prodigy, an early Internet Service Provider. It was a heady experience not unlike my previous discovery of fantasy and science fiction fandom. Despite the strictures of an online environment, we Online Quilters used Prodigy's bulletin boards (and the US Postal Service) to swap quilt blocks and fabric squares; to place group orders for specialized tools; to give lessons and hold workshops; and to participate in co-operative projects such as group quilts and round robins.

Outsiders wondered how we could become such close friends of people we'd never met face to face. Actually, we did occasionally meet at quilt shows. We wore blue fabric stars (based on Prodigy's logo) to identify ourselves and held "show & tell" (a traditional quilt guild activity) in the parking lots outside the shows.

(Later, due to conflicts with Prodigy's restrictions on content and its erratic deletion of bulletin board messages, most of us migrated to GEnie where we merrily continued our online quilt life.)

A lot of my basic knowledge of quilting came originally from the Online Quilters, including the merits of Quilter's Newsletter.

The first issue of QNM was published in September, 1969. At that time there were few quilting books available, no quilt stores, and none of the specialized tools quilters now take for granted. One hundred per cent cotton was difficult to find having been replaced with polyester-cotton blends. It was the age of bonded double knits. (Shudder!) Bonnie Leman began publishing QNM just ahead of the explosion of renewed interest in quilting which began in the early '70s which has continued unabated to the present day.

I acquired most of my back issues in the mid '90s when my local quilt guilt decided to sell off its collection at the annual Trash 'n Treasures meeting.

And what a treasure it was! I managed to snag over ten year's worth. Paging through the early issues was a time-traveling journey back to a day when hand piecing was still dominant and templates did not include seam allowances. Rotary cutters had yet to be invented and it was still rather daring to assert that machine quilting could be a legitimate option. Wall hangings, (i.e. small quilts that are hung up for decoration) were looked down upon by a certain faction of quiltdom who felt that a quilt wasn't really a quilt unless it covered a bed.

Paging through my collection, I've watched the rise and fall of various techniques and styles of quiltmaking. (I recall at least two articles on how to make quilts from scraps of bonded polyester knit!) I've read early articles by people who are now big names in the field. Through the pages of QNM I've watched the quilting community grow from scattered, isolated people swapping copies of patterns published in the 1930s by newspapers like the Kansas City Star, to a large diverse group of individuals ranging from those who consider themselves to be mere crafters to those who see themselves as serious artists. And they are supported by an enormous industry selling fabrics and tools that were undreamed of in 1969.

And occasionally the world of the Online Quilters and the world of QNM intersected. In the April '91 issue, p. 37, is a picture of Diane Rode Schneck's quilt, "Ugly Tie Contest." She made it with fabrics from our annual Ugly Fabric Swap. I can see the fabric I contributed, right there! The peach colored one with the little black locomotives.

Thanks to the Internet (and a current subscription), I now have a fairly complete collection of Quilters Newsletter. But I'm still missing quite a few issues between 1969 and 1972. If anyone out there has some that need a loving home, let me know.

Beautiful Places to Read

Starting with the library of the Strahov Monastery in Prague, Curious Expeditions has assembled a compendium of beautiful libraries here. If you scroll all the way down through all the libraries, your mouse finger will go numb and your brain will go into visual overload!

Duplicates

There's nothing like having to pack up and move forty years' worth of book collecting to make a person become a just little ruthless in the matter of duplicates. I tried to weed them out as I was packing, but they still keep turning up.

I know that some of our duplicates were due to the vagaries of our shelving system. For example, my husband divided the history section into rough subject catagories, but didn't alpabetize by author or title. Consequently, duplicates, overlooked in the jumble, crept in without our knowledge. Or sometimes they would hide themselves by being filed in two different catagories -- one copy of Tom Aquinas in the religion section and another in philosophy.

As I unpack I've rigorously alphabetized by author and then title and have turned up a fair number of unsuspected duplicates. (Would you believe three copies of Religion and the Rise of Western Culture? How did that happen?) In general, I've decided to keep hardcover copies rather than paperbacks though allowing some exceptions based on sentiment. For example, even though I also own a hardcover copy, I could never discard my paperback edition of 84 Charingcross Road. It's got the romantic inscription from my husband who was a bookseller before we married.

I had to steel myself to relinquish my battered childhood copy of Tom Sawyer in favor of the very nice hardcover collection of Twain's Mississippi writings. And I do feel some regret. The older copy was one of my very early book purchases. I'd bought it at the local Woolworths which, for a time, had a big stack of used books which they were selling off cheaply. I used to walk there (it was about a mile from my home) and root through the pile looking for books I had already read. My allowance was only 25 cents a week, so I seldom took chances on a book I hadn't read yet. I see that the copy of Daddy-Long-Legs which I bought there was priced at 50 cents. So that gives you an idea of my limited purchasing power.

Lately I've been unpacking the paperback fantasy, science fiction, and literature.

Hmmm. Two copies of Voyage to Arcturas. I still haven't read that! And we bought it way back in the '70s because we'd read that C.S. Lewis had been impressed by it. And look how many volumes we have from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series! I'm embarassed by how many I haven't read. And judging by their pristine condition, some of them were never read by either my husband or myself. (Blush!) But it seemed so important to buy them back when, thanks to the popularity of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, old works of fantasy were finally being reprinted and new ones were being published. We always thought we'd get around to reading them sooner or later. I still intend to, but I never imagined it would be during my retirement.

I'm trying to be ruthless about culling the dupes, but I find that there are limits. Can I really part with my Ballantine copies of Lord of the Rings -- even though I have the Allen & Unwin one volume edition (slipcased and printed on India paper) and the Folio Society's edition (with illustrations by Ingahild Grathmer)? I know that Tolkien never liked the covers of the Ballentine edition (especially the little emu critters), but nothing brings backthe '60s, the era when I first read LOTR, like those battered paperbacks which lined up side by side to form a continuous landscape. In cases like these a book is more than a work of literature -- it's also an artifact of personal history. Besides, my Ballentine LOTR has little paper bookmarks scattered throughout the pages with penciled drawings of elves, hobbits, and Vulcans which I doodled while working at Telecredit in the mid '70s. And they just wouldn't fit in my newer, nicer editions.

Back to the Future

Today I was unpacking the paperback fantasy and science fiction. My goodness, some of these are old! The cover prices on these are twenty-five to thirty-five cents.

(I bought these used, of course. I'm not that old! )

I am charmed by the cover art . As usual, it has almost nothing to do with the contents of the novel, a tradition upheld by many publishers even unto the present day.

Handling these and others in my collection brought back many memories of the future as it used to exist. It was a hopeful place by and large.

Too Many Books?

I used to congratulate myself on not being a materialistic person.

Oh Lord, I thank you I am not like the rest of men, amassers of money, clothes, electronics. . .

But after I had packed over 100 boxes of books (at which point I lost count), I began to wonder. I had always considered books to be the least worldly of possessions because they seemed to be the least tangible. Sure, they take up physical space, but what are they really? Not cardboard and paper. They are the incarnation of someone's thoughts, dreams, wisdom or imagination. When we write -- especially fiction -- we come closest to imitating God the Creator, in whose likeness we are made.

When God creates he makes something out of nothing, bringing matter itself into existence by an act of thought and will. Writing is as close as we can come to creating, using words to embody our thoughts and bringing into being somthing that did not exist before.

But is it possible to have too many books? I'm still not sure, but I did do some weeding as I packed.

Months have passed, and the continental mass has shrunk to a major island, the dining room has returned to the function for which it was intended, and the bedchamber, now the library annex, could actually hold a bed if there weren't so many bookshelves in it. The main portion of the library is housed in what was originally a master bedroom. I've removed the sliding doors from the huge (157 inches wide!) closet and filled the resulting alcove with five BILLY bookcases from Ikea. Matching bookcases line the other three walls, and there is a double row of short ones running down the center of the room.

As you can see, it's starting to look like a real library. I feel very peaceful when I sit at my computer (just off-screen to the left), surrounded by my books.

Boxes, Boxes, Everywhere

I moved into this house in piecemeal fashion. Brothers, family friends, a brother-in-law, and anyone I knew with a kind heart and a strong back helped me to move in whatever hours they could spare. So in dribs and drabs the boxes piled up in my new living room.

I was using boxes scavenged from Barnes & Noble (19 x 13 x 8.5) which were far too heavy for me to lift once they were filled with books but posed no problems for my masculine helpers. (Thank you, O Lord, for giving that half of the human race greater upper body strength!)

Soon the living room held a majestic continent of boxes stacked three high. Peninsulas jutted out into the dining area, and an archipelago of boxes made it difficult to navigate one's way through the smaller downstairs bedroom. It is fortunate that I have no living room furniture!