My Books

I saw an article this morning about the ten things that guys like to collect.  It was an interesting list because – for the most part – it was stuff I never considered collecting.  Here’s the list: Sports cards, coins, tools, knives, stamps, alcohol, car miniatures, figurines (stuff like action figures and pop icons), watches, and vinyl records.  

Some of these things I did collect for short periods in my life.  When I was a kid back in the 50s, I collected baseball cards one summer.  I also collected pennies for a while.  I tried to get one example of every penny minted between 1900 and 1962.  I was pretty successful.  I think I tracked down about 99 of the 150 different pennies minted in the US during those years.  I don’t know what happened to my baseball cards and the pennies.  Probably my mom swept them out of the house with a lot of the other stuff I dragged in.  

What I really love collecting are books! I’m 76 this year, and I’ve probably been collecting books for 69 years.  I’ve still got comic books I bought at Mandel’s soda shop and toy store on the corner of Potomac and Washtenaw back in 1957.  And those aren’t the only books I’ve still got.  

In my early teens, I became a crazy fan of science fiction novels, reading a sci fi book every couple of days, and then a little later I became a crazy fan of hard-boiled detective novels by writers like Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald, and then I became a crazier fan of the Beat writers like Kerouac and William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and then I became a crazy fan of crazy postmodern novelists like Thomas Pynchon and John Barth, and then I became the biggest fan of great Polish writers like Milosz and Sienkiewicz and Szymborska and Isaac Bashevis Singer and so many others.

I not only read these authors I collected their books!

At one point, I had more than 4,000 books.

Some of these books I’ve been hauling around for almost 70 years.  I’ve still got books I bought in my teens and twenties at the Maxwell Street flea market, at dumpy book stores that were here today and gone tomorrow, at down and out second-hand stores in Chicago run by failed rabbis and fired university professors.  

Since I left Chicago in 1975 to go to graduate school in Indiana, I've hauled these books to 20 different apartments and houses my wife Linda and I have lived in.  I’ve hauled the books from Chicago to Lafayette, Indiana, to Normal, Illinois, to Charleston, Illinois, to Mobile, Alabama, to Peoria, Illinois, then back to Charleston, Illinois, and from there to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Valdosta, Georgia to Danville, Virginia, and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia.  

Let me tell you, moving these books wasn’t ever easy.  One time when we moved from Mobile to Peoria we decided it was cheaper to mail the boxes of books rather than to rent a U-Haul truck that the 133 boxes of book would fit in.  This was back in the late 1980s and shipping a box of books cost about a buck fifty. 

At one point, just before we moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where my wife Linda got a job as the director of the writing program at Western Kentucky University, she persuaded me to start downsizing my collection of books.  

I hated to do it, but I did it anyway.  At least a little.  

And what did I do with the books?

I gave a lot of my books to my students.  Every two or three days, I would fill a couple of boxes with books that I figured I would never read or need again, and I placed the books outside my office door.  By the next day, the boxes were empty.  I also gave boxes and boxes of the books by Polish writers along with the  academic journals I had collected over the years to my university library.   At one point, I even sold some of the rarer books on Amazon and Ebay. 

Despite all of this, I still have too many books today, enough to fill 8, 6-foot tall bookcases. I’ve dropped from 133 boxes of books down to about 30.  

Mostly, the books I have left are the ones that meant the most to me, the books by authors who reflected who I was and shaped who I have become.   And I walk past these books every day, and I stop and sit in the room the bookcases are in, and I read a chapter or two from one of the books that have shaped me and remember how important these books are to me,  and I wonder what will happen to them when I’m gone.  

I know my wife and my daughter and granddaughter know how much these books mean to me, but I also know keeping them and cherishing them because of how they shaped me so many years ago isn’t going to happen.  Perhaps my wife and my daughter and granddaughter will each take a book or two, but the rest will go where old books go.

To libraries or garage sales or Goodwill industries.