“Uncle CJ, you have more books than me,” said my 24-year-old niece, looking in wonder at my book-jammed apartment. I chuckled, thinking, “I’ve had a bit of a head start.”
I don’t know how many books I have. When I try to count them I get lost in “Oo! I forgot about that one,” and “Wait! I haven’t read that!” Or, “When did I get that?” It ends well, however: I read another book.
When I was in the 8th grade, my mother’s employer — a Regent at the University of Pittsburgh — wrangled me a job in the closed stacks of the University’s library. (I started at 50 cents per hour; I may not have been on the books for all of the five years I worked there.) This was my dream job, since I had been spending all available weekend daylight hours in Carnegie Library, down the street from the Pitt campus.
One day, in the hallway outside of the stacks, I found a big canvas bin filled with books. It was in front of the freight elevator, and apparently destined for the trash. I burst into my boss’ office (hyperbole: his desk was in an open area) and asked about the books. He told me that the university gets donations of books, and when they have too many of one book, they trash the oldest and most damaged ones. “These books are going in the trash?” That evening, my mother asked me where I got the books I lugged into the house. She had years of late notices from the library to caution her, and looked askance at me when I told her they were the fruits of my University dumpster diving.
When I moved from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles, my first bride and I shipped boxes of books to be stored in her aunt’s garage until we arrived. Six weeks later, we were sickened to find a leaky ceiling had ruined many those books. My history of bullfighting, complete with color plates, was ruined, though I was able to salvage some others.
My eldest daughter used to be a “boarder” (book hoarder); she claims it resulted from a lecture I gave her when she was a 7-year-old, trying to sell her books at a yard sale. “Never, ever, sell your books,” she asserts that I said. Her response was to keep every book she ever acquired (which is eerily similar to my own behavior).
During a long-ago visit with my two youngest kids, I was sitting on the couch at my second bride’s house, listening to an NPR book review on the radio. At the end of the program and I went to the bookstore to buy the book. Bride Two noted that she had never seen such an immediate response to a book review.
Not only a reader and buyer, I am a book pusher: my gifts to good friends and family are often books. My niece Jess (who is, in fact, my best friend’s daughter) graduated from Ball State with a degree in journalism. When she graduated from high school, I gave her a book, and five years later, she noted that, “… I can’t bear to let go of my books … (f)lipping through one of my favorites, ‘The Race Beat,’ a story of journalists at the forefront of the civil rights movement, I found this letter from my uncle written to me upon my high school graduation …”
I recently sent a text to Jess to let her know that after the Benton House book sale, I am 8 books richer, and booked solid.