Far Corners of Home

Kamloops. The name won’t leave my head, and I can’t help pronouncing it aloud every few minutes. (Try it. It's very satisfying to say aloud.) Sarah can’t figure what I’m talking about. David hasn’t asked—yet. The Kamloops on my mind has nothing to do with British Columbia. No, it was a ship—and is, still, a shipwreck. The 1923-built ‘Kamloops’ went down in 1927 off the coast of Isle Royale, and it’s on my mind because I just finished Nevada Barr’s A Superior Death. (What a story!) And now, ever so slightly obsessed with Nevada Barr, I was intrigued to find her on a website of Mississippi writers, although she was born in Nevada and grew up in California. Since she lived a while in Mississippi...also in New York...and currently lives in New Orleans, by the unwritten rules of bookselling this makes her a Nevada writer, California writer, Mississippi writer, and Louisiana writer, at the very least. (Whether or not New York booksellers claim her as belonging to the Big Apple, I know not. NYC is its own universe.) How many states, after all, claim Hemingway as one of their own? Illinois (birthplace) and Michigan (family summer home) are among the number but hardly form an exhaustive list.

In my bookstore, Dog Ears Books, as in others I know in northern Michigan, there is a section called “Michigan.” All my used and out-of-print Michigan fiction is there, followed by used and OP nonfiction—history, natural history, memoir, essays, etc. On the bookshelves holding new books, there is also a section for books Michigan.

Deciding what counts as a Michigan book is a little more straightforward than identifying Michigan authors. A Superior Death takes place on Isle Royale in Lake Superior within the boundaries of the state of Michigan. The story is clearly set in Michigan. If a Michigan historian wrote a history of Georgia, I would shelve that book in Southern history and travel. (I collapsed travel and history sections some years back, frustrated by such questions as, “Do you have any books on China?” and the confusing directions involved in the answers.) But on the Michigan fiction shelves there are always, besides stories set in Michigan, others set elsewhere but written by Michigan writers--for example, Alaskan Gold Rush adventure stories by James B. Hendryx of Suttons Bay and James Oliver Curwood of Owosso and Western literary fiction by Jim Harrison.

Now that I’ve been immersed—submerged—in Michigan fiction for a couple of days, I've turned back to The Honey Trail, by Australian travel writer Grace Pundyk, where, in the chapter on Borneo, I’ve just traveled five hours upriver to an isolated, roadless river village. I’m not in Michigan any more—until I put down the book and walk outdoors again.

How Much Shelf Space Is Enough?

In a recent post and comments following, there was the beginning of a discussion of books in their role of furnishing our homes. After Walt estimated bookshelf footage in his house, I was curious and, borrowing David’s tape measure and then rounding off and estimating and multiplying from there, I came up with a figure of 75 feet in our old farmhouse. I think I may have forgotten a very full bookcase upstairs in the guest room, but the figure seems close enough. And then (funny how this works out) the very next evening David decided we had to rearrange one of our rooms, which involved moving the larger of two bookcases there from one wall to another opposite. Everything had to be taken off the shelves so the heavy piece of furniture could be moved—and thoroughly dusted!

No, our shelves are not French chalked quarter-sawn oak. They are homemade, pine boards with particleboard backing, and while if you look very hard, you might find one or two leatherbound books, you would also find books that lost their binding long ago. Here’s one:



This is an example of a book not good enough to put out for sale at Dog Ears and too good to toss in the recycling bin. (Robert Burns! Trash, never! I cannot believe I missed his birthday!) Any decorator who inspected our bookshelves would have palpitations, for sure.

While we did organize a little bit (very roughly) in reshelving these books, some titles defy category. Where would you put Without Machinery, an old upper grade school social studies book?


Such a charming book! The chapter I've opened to here, about nomadic reindeer herders in Lapland, is titled "The Winter Home." Our winter home is mostly the central room in our house, while the front porch and the outdoors are our summer home.


Would you put “books by people we know” all together on a shelf or separate them according to whether they are fiction, poetry, memoir or whatever? A couple of my favorite children’s books make special any spot they occupy.


My cookbooks have a separate little bookcase in this same room. (Don’t ask me why my big French dictionaries are with the cookbooks.)


There are more bookcases in our living room, in David’s office, in the “cozy room” and in the upstairs guest room. In our bedroom we have to stack books on our dressers. These are books we’re reading at bedtime, either silently to ourselves or aloud to each other. And now we are in the throes of making ready to tear out our old kitchen, which was the inspiration for last night’s reorganization: our dining table had to move so it wouldn’t be in the way of outgoing cupboards and incoming sheets of drywall, and the bookcase and leather chairs had to move to make room for the dining table. I’m not posting pictures of the room because we have yet to repaint the walls and floors, but already we like the new configuration. “We were getting in a rut,” we agreed. The only problem so far is that there is no room for the little lamp-and-book table that used to sit between our two reading chairs.

Can we live without a place to stack up books? Or will our dining table gradually disappear from view and the future find us with our plates on our laps?

Books for Looks?

This was our Saturday afternoon homecoming. Can you blame us for staying home on Sunday with books, magazines and old newspapers?

A friend who braved the weather yesterday to visit Dog Ears Books brought me a section of the New York Times from earlier this month. For those of you who missed the article my friend knew would interest me, “Selling a Book by Its Cover,” you can find it online here.


The idea is that a well-stocked library is part of the design of a house. It’s part of interior decoration:

Jeffrey Collé, a builder of vast Hamptons estates that mimic turn-of-the-century designs, wouldn’t think of omitting a library from one of his creations. A 16,800-square-foot Shingle-style house on 42 acres in Water Mill, N.Y., comes with a $29.995-million price tag and a library Mr. Collé had built from French chalked quarter-sawn oak; with about 150 feet of shelf space, there is room for more than 1,000 books.

It’s up to the buyers or their decorator to fill that space, said Mr. Collé....

Not all clients rule out the possibility of reading their home décor--some, for instance, want only books in English for that very reason—but others are happy to have stacks of books all wrapped in white (or black) as “design elements” in a room where nothing is left to chance, presumably in a house where every tschoschke and its position on a table has been carefully planned. (I guess some people really live like this.) My friend was appalled and thought I would be, too. Well, I can’t see much value in books as nothing more than stacks of white or black, but shelves of real, readable books? Maybe someone will read them—if not the people who paid for the house, then their guests or their grandchildren.


But are we, as one trend-spotter in the article claimed, turning codices (the old word codex is now new again, distinguishing a printed, bound book from an e-book) into fetishes? Fetish! That’s pretty loaded language. Instead of agreeing or disagreeing and making an argument, I looked around my own house and came up with more questions. Why do we photograph natural objects and put those photographs on our walls? Why do we (some of us) have stones and shells and animal bones on our bookshelves, along with the books. Is that small mammal skull a fetish? Those deer jawbones? (Where did my deer jawbones get to, anyway?) Is there something all of these objects on shelves have in common?


[Caveat, disclaimer, disclosure, whatever: There has never been an interior decorator involved in our house. I probably don’t need to say so. Surely our books and bookshelves speak for themselves. Just remember that that’s beside the point, okay? Don’t get distracted! What do books, shells, stones and skulls have in common?]

Here’s what I think. We are physical inhabitants of a physical world and also spiritually connected both to one another and to other aspects of the world, and so we bring into our individual home spaces some of the objects from the larger world that make that larger world our home, too. This stone connects me to a beach covered now by snow and ice. A walk on another beach hundreds of miles away turned up this shell. Finding jawbones of a deer down by the creek years ago, I felt my connection to an individual animal I might never have seen but who was, for a while, a neighbor, and the little raccoon (possum?) also was another being like us, once warm and alive, needing food and shelter. Like these animals, we will one day lose our warmth and life, but even then, like the stone and the shell and bones, we will leave some traces behind.


Every book on the shelf contains human life. Traces, lives, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, events. Readers and non-readers alike sense that books connect us to other human beings in our own and in earlier times, every book a product of other inhabitants of our home, this earth. Wanting them around us, it seems to me, is recognition of their value. Whether or not it constitutes fetishism, I leave for others to decide.

I am fairly well convinced, though, that I need to make crisp new dust jackets for the 25-volume set of the complete works of Mark Twain in my bookshop, its covers worn and faded by the years. A lot of people do judge books by their covers--at least, the cover gives them their first impression--and to many the look of the books on their shelves is important, so Mark Twain needs a facelift. Unless someone comes in to buy the set before I get around to the beautification project. And I have all those stones and shells and bones to handle and rearrange before I start making dust jackets. First things first.