Different Pace and Content: Work at Home

November palette

Over the weekend I read through the latest Bookforum (disorientingly labeled the “December/January 2016” issue), reading that began between customers at my bookshop on Saturday and continued early Sunday morning, stopped for Sunday breakfast, and ended finally mid-morning on a sunny November day at home. I read parts of a couple pieces aloud to David after breakfast as we enjoyed a leisurely start to a day that would be largely consumed by home improvement work, but mostly I read quietly to myself, pen in hand.

One of the things I enjoy about reading Bookforum and the New York Review of Books is that they are not books, and therefore (this is the payoff) I can let myself underline with impunity, guiltlessly, compulsively, even with a sense of performing a serious readerly duty, in much the way I once marked up and made my own xeroxed copies of scholarly philosophy papers handed out by professors in graduate school. In those days, when the books were my own and not borrowed library copies, I even underlined and made marginal notes in bound philosophy texts because those texts, in those days, were my work. Casual reading was not an option: sharp focus was essential. Reading and forgetting would be time lost: I wanted to be able to relocate main lines of argument quickly, along with the writer’s points of support.

Old graduate school habits return when I read literary reviews in magazine form. What praise is the reviewer bestowing, and why? What is criticized, and how? What criticisms leveled by others does this reviewer mention and then either confirm or reject? Finally, in the end, has the reviewer convinced me to read the book – and with what particular words? Reviewer Leslie Jamison on Sunday gave me an eagerness to read Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare, an eagerness I had not felt when reading a couple other reviews elsewhere of the same book.

Bookforum and NYRB also contain whole pages of new release ads from various publishers. Pen in hand, I circle promising titles. That is part of my work these days, in the bookseller stage of my life.

This year’s October excitement for us at home was the long-awaited installation of seven new windows in our old farmhouse, along with removal and replacement of one wall’s old insulation and exterior siding. Now begins the do-it-ourselves phase: getting bedroom walls prepped and freshly painted. And so my Sunday – reading and underlining, big breakfast, then up and down ladders with rags and tools. Later, time outdoors with Sarah and a run to Northport to retrieve Chaucer and nip into the grocery store for more eggs so I could make stuffing for Sunday roast chicken. Tonight will be chicken pie.

How quickly November days reach an end! And long before they end, how sharply the temperature drops as the sun begins its afternoon drop in the west! First, “Already cold!” followed by “Already dark!”

It’s good to have plenty of books (and the promise of more), and it’s good to have stout, tight new windows, too, as days grow shorter and winter comes near. When the painting project is finished and the room put back together, walls a clean, calm, restful cocoa color, it will be good to have quiet mornings again, as I had last winter, with the fictional characters of my own creation. We were not together much over the summer, but perhaps I begin to see them more clearly for our time apart. Anyway, I’ve missed being with them.

I will, of course, be back at the bookstore tomorrow, Tuesday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sarah will be there, too.

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.