Book lovers

I could blame it on my grandfather, Dada, easily. My love for books and proclivity for keeping them in stacks all around me at all times. There was not a surface in his house without a stack of magazines, books, and paper on. He was a man of many desks. He fit them in, with plywood, whereever he could. I never saw his space clean in the conventional since. I am sure he had his own system, as we all do.

He wrote too, books on business management. And a few short family stories that he had rewritten to be larger life lessons, ones i am not sure he ever learned himself. He would make books with my sister and I, when we were young. Cut and fold a piece of paper to make a short story with our own illustrations.

And my father too, has books. He has always been much more organized than my grandfather but our house was never short on books. So, I grew up with books around me and I continue to live with books around me. But I think to say I like books just because my dad and grandfather did is not all there is to it. My father was also a potter, but I did not ever want to work with clay. At some point I chose to keep collecting books, and this comes down to a feeling.

Each book is a world. No matter if it is fiction, non fiction, poetry, photographs, entering a book is entering the creators time, place and perspective. To surround myself with books is an attempt to surround myself with the world.

This tangible feeling of delight looking through, and reading books, is what keeps me collecting, searching for, and buying new books. And I think it could come back to my childhood relationship with books. Because a book, especially when i was young, comes from some body, usually as a gift. And then this book represents this person. This is why I haven’t gotten rid of Dada’s multiple duplicates of Steinbeck. And even when the book is not a direct gift, most of what I look for are what other people have recommended or cited as being an influence on them.

Each book is much more than just the words written between its covers. It is a physical object that connects me to the world.