![]() In the late 1970's, I worked as a curatorial assistant at the Pierpont Morgan Library, and on the shelves behind my desk stood books that were hundreds of years old - their paper crisp and white, the ink still precise. The thought of remapping my literary memory is simply too much to stand. I can often picture just where I need to look inside a book, though I can't remember for the life of me where the book is actually shelved. That is the peculiar thing about living with so many books. Replacing that old familiar edition means learning a new map of the text. It is easier to remember just where a passage appears, spatially, than exactly what it says. Like many readers, I have a visual memory for books. ![]() They are probably worth abandoning for that reason alone.īut to me, "Mansfield Park" is that one edition. The marks have almost everything to do with who I was as a reader in the late 1970's and almost nothing to do with Jane Austen. But replacing it means abandoning all the marks I made in it when I read it in graduate school. My Penguin copy of Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park" is identical to the thousands - if not tens of thousands - of other copies that were printed when that edition first appeared. The other solution is to honor the ephemeral nature of paperbacks and replace them, as if they were vinyl LP's waiting to be replaced by CD's. One is to go on handling the paperbacks ever more carefully until the time, which doesn't really seem that far away, when all that remains is neatly organized piles of yellow dust on the bookshelves. Their texts may be of permanent value, but the physical objects are not. The books themselves are not really worth restoring, of course. Even poor Kierkegaard, published by Princeton, snapped in two the other day. You would not believe how sallow Samuel Butler looks, how debilitated Flaubert has become. As for Defoe, he was one of the first to go to pieces. Nearly all of my old Penguin classics - the ones with the black spines - are dis-binding themselves. I reread a Dorothy Sayers mystery a couple of weeks ago and found myself using a page from the middle of the book as a bookmark. The glue in the bindings has turned brittle. Now that paperback library is coming apart. I had grown up on public libraries, but cheap paperbacks made it possible to have a library of my own. Each one felt like another stone in the raising of a free-form house. I kept a small stack of them - Twain, Faulkner, way too much Aldous Huxley - beside the clock radio on my bedside table. I began buying them when I was in high school. How did these things get to be so old?īut nothing meters the passing of time like paperback books. They have been looking at me since I was an infant. The ears are coming apart at the edges, though the glass eyes are as bright as ever. ![]() In the stairwell hangs a mounted deer head - a mule deer my dad shot a couple of years before I was born. I put on a jacket to do chores and realize that I bought it in 1987. Some days I suspect that the objects around me are aging faster than I am.
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