I teased my husband about this, but he was serious. “I want my ‘Kid from Tomkinsville’ back,” he said. He was referring to a book from his childhood by John R. Tunis about a baseball player. I had persuaded him to give it to his sports-crazy youngest grandchild. Bill is convinced that the boy has not read the book, has not properly valued it. He’s probably right, but then, hardly anyone could properly value a book to his exacting standards. In an effort to put things right and perhaps tease him a bit further, I found a used copy of the book online and am presenting it to him for his birthday.
Collecting, keeping, valuing books — the kind on paper with hard or soft covers — is a habit that has occupied members of my family for several generations. My father’s library finally came to the United States from Hungary several years after our family did. A relative who survived World War II in Budapest managed to ship those books out during the brief interval after the Germans left and before the Communists took over.
My father prized his books, both as beautiful objects and as sources of information, delight, and even, at times, wisdom. He also knew their commercial value and remained on the mailing lists of rare book dealers until the end of his long life. He left a few volumes to his sister, Clary, who had read the classics of Latin and Greek in her youth, and who outlived him by a decade. When I asked her whether she was reading them, she replied that her eyesight was no longer good enough. “I just pat them,” she said, smiling.
When it was time to dispose of the books after the death of both of my parents, I first asked our kids and grandkids to choose what they wanted, then called in a couple of used book dealers, and finally sent the remainder to the auction house that took everything else that was left in their condo. I did something similar for the library of a friend whose children did not want to deal with her large collection after her death.
Anyone who owns books in a serious way thinks about their final resting place. Who, if anyone, will want them? And what if no one does? Shakespeare offers a solution by way of Prospero in “The Tempest,” who declares “I’ll drown my book.” Well, of course he’s talking about his book of magic spells, and there’s evidently only one, but the sentiment is understandable.
A recent article in The New York Times describes what the novelist Philip Roth is doing with his personal library — not drowning it, but donating it to the Newark Public Library, which is remodeling a section of the building to hold the approximately 4,000 volumes. This number is comparable to the books multiplying continuously on the shelves in our house. There are some other similarities: like Roth, my husband, Bill, is a writer, though not a novelist. Both were born in 1932 and spent a serious amount of time in their youth in their local public libraries. Bill’s was not Newark, but Johnson City, New York. There are other similarities: Roth tells his interviewer that his “first bookish love” was the baseball novels of John R. Tunis, author of that insufficiently loved gift to our grandchild.
Despite the similarities, no library is going to be remodeled to hold our collection. (Yes, I have a few books, too.) It will likely be scattered to the four winds. Maybe in the future, people will only read on Kindles and other electronic devices. They may be convenient, but they surely lack emotional resonance. I can’t imagine patting a Kindle with much pleasure.
Marietta Pritchard can be reached at mppritchard@comcast.net