Books and the Woman
How my life comes in small paper packets bound with a spine
Organizing my home library has been something I’ve been dreading for months. We live in an old farmhouse built shortly after the Civil War. Several years ago, the floor of the room where most of our library lived imploded, and we had to empty the bookshelves and stash books everywhere in the house until we could replace the floor. Then we acquired renters, had our daughters move out, had our renters move out, lost another antique floor and replaced it, had our adult children move out, had our daughter and her husband move into their space—which meant we had to move much of the books stored in their rooms, and then we moved our bedroom into the original imploded floor room, replaced the bookshelves, and bought more, and I realized over the summer that we were finally in a position to begin to put everything back where it originally was and resolved to make that an entry on the summer to-do list.
Now on Labor Day, with a chance to actually tackle it, I begin.
As an author and editor, I am in the wrong profession when it comes to downsizing books—sorry, Marie Condo. I receive free review books, keep books written by friends as mementos, plus over the years I have been offered the chance to take what I like from the libraries of literary friends who have died or are moving to a different stage of life—and I have a hard time not taking the lot. And now that I can occasionally adjunct at Christendom College, I have achieved the prized possession of a library card and borrowing privileges—plus good deals on their ample used books. Ah! The chance to actually own books I read for research is so tempting when a good version comes up. So since the exodus and wanderings of my home library began, I have acquired about another half of a library...
And I see no end in sight. I don’t read on Kindle because I work with screens all day and don’t want more of the same during my slivers of recreational reading, especially before bed. So I have books, stacks and stacks of them, and I love having them, despite the trouble of maintaining such.
I begin sorting. I need to type this out to help me THINK. Here are the rough categories I am perceiving as I page through the stacks. My personal collection consists of …
Old books
Somehow in my upbringing I picked up the idea that the Good Life, insofar as it’s possible on earth, consists in having small cups of hot tea, comfortable and lovely upholstered chairs, and bookshelves full of old beautifully bound books, whether that means actual old books or new editions of old books. So as a young adult, I began collecting books, especially once I discovered that many of them can be bought cheaply. My first acquisition (when I was in high school) was a set of Dover Beatrix Potters with good watercolor prints. When I was single, I delighted in using my discretionary income to purchase copies from the late lamented Loome’s Theological Bookstore, back in the days when old books were very hard to find, and started my collection of G. K. Chesterton books. I went on to collect titles I recognized, including classics in good condition from antique stores and a set of library classics my mom culled from my parish grade school library sale, and hence brought a hefty stack of olds into my marriage.
Then my brother-in-law, a librarian, mortified me by examining my treasures, including my prized Tennyson’s poem (seen above), and pronouncing most of them wanting. He told me many of my old books would disintegrate into dust because although old, they were printed on cheap wood pulp paper. Then he taught me how to recognize cloth paper and recommended I focus on collecting those (such as the copy of Child Life above). So I did, and have augmented my collection amply. I’ve never finished most of these old books, I confess, but I love looking at them, and from time to time, I pull one out to peruse it, just for the experience. I am doing so now.
…Why is there honey on the down right front cover of This Tremendous Lover, a book which I have not read (though I own two copies) and have rarely taken off the shelf? Mysteries…
Children’s Books
For someone who began her novelist career with Bethlehem Books, I have long recognized the usefulness of children’s literature in transmitting culture and I have never surrendered my childhood favorites, and keep aging cloth-bound editions of Hitty, The Call of the Wild, The Wind in the Willows, and The Trumpeter of Krakow. And I am still collecting Jenny Linsky books and Jennifer Wayne’s incomparably illustrated Sprout books, as well as the Nate the Great books whose understated sarcasm I love. Plus I have shelves of illustrated fairy tales for my kids—ok, I can’t even go there. I’m mentally eliminating them from this cleanup. Fortunately most of them live in the book nook which is part of the children’s play area and so remained undisturbed during the house literary upheaval.
Soul books
I cannot imagine life without these books. Even though I don’t crack them open often, I’ve read them so many times they serve as mental reference points, a constellation of linked ideas, and the most crucial titles reside on the shelf above my desk. At the center is my prized collection of books by C.S. Lewis and Chesterton (Tolkien has half a bookshelf to himself in my bedroom, thanks to a friend bestowing his first editions of The History of Middle Earth upon my lowly and grateful self). But I also have most of Shakespeare’s plays—collected works plus nice editions, and Mr. Blue and the Poetics and what I’ve managed to collect of Charles Williams’ oeuvre.
My motley collection of thought lodestars includes books as wide-ranging and obscure as L’Engle’s Walking on Water, Prager’s Happiness is a Serious Problem, Friedman’s Jewish Identity, Lozano’s The Older Brother Returns, and Hahn & McGinley’s It is Right and Just. I just added The Obedience Paradox by my friend Mary Stanford to this shelf. If you’ve ever tried to detangle the Catholic view on headship in marriage, you have to check it out.
…I have mislaid or loaned my copy of The Temperament God Gave You by Art and Larraine Bennet. I cannot imagine my life without it, and I am wondering if I should move the sequel The Temperament God Gave Your Spouse to another shelf or just keep it here in memory of its missing partner.
Books on Writing & Teaching English
There are many books I could list here, but I only will list the few references that I keep on my desk bookshelf. The Art of Dramatic Writing. Everything I know about storywriting I learned from Lajos Egri and Janet Batchler. (Thank you, Janet! Write a book, please, so I can capture you somehow on my bookshelf.) Lajos, the 1960 edition in ghastly purple with orange lettering (a combo that is eerily popular again just now), is well thumbed. I teach from it every time I teach fiction writing. It’s in fairly good condition, which I think is due to the reverence I have for it: I first read it when I was about twelve (it is not an appropriate book for a twelve-year-old, FYI), so either I replaced my original somewhere along the line, or I was lucky.
Also some reference books. My super-cool ex-bookstore-owner friend gifted me a vintage set of Webster’s Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Manual of English Pronunciation and Spelling. When I was bemoaning the crumbling disintegration of my personal high school thesaurus, my daughter re-covered it for me. Which I love. I also have Our Mother Tongue, Rex Barks (the diagramming classic), Warner’s English, a college writing textbook for reference, and Perrine’s Sound and Sense for poetry. As a high school teacher, even though I use many online tools, I like having these on hand.
Books I’ve Contributed To
Sometimes you just need to find them for some reason so I keep them on one corner of my desk bookshelf: How I Pray Now and Against the Stream are two very obscure entries there. So I have a this shelf of these—I was about to give away The Catholic Homeschool Companion and then discovered they actually recommend me, which is sweet. But the book is thick and I may just put it elsewhere.
Happy to say my novels are not on this shelf. They are usually in play in the house (this is a good thing, right?) and have mostly torn covers and cracked bindings—except for the first edition signed hardcovers which belong to my husband and which, he has let us all know, no one, including his wife, is ever allowed to borrow. Despite this, he currently does not have a complete set. Someone has pinched one.
Overall I feel my writing career, such as it is, has turned out fairly well.
Poetry
I have a lot of these. Can’t imagine giving them away or living my life without them. Do I ever read them? Seldom. But I have memorized poems inside them and so they are sort of an external brain. Also I am friends with poets. I own their books. I can’t possibly give these often self-published chapbooks away. I may own one of the few copies in existence!
Borrowed books
This guilt-ridden section includes one obscure biblical commentary borrowed from a cloistered nun which I really should return, even though the chances of her hunting me down to demand it back are scant. Even worse, I have an antique copy of my favorite Shakespeare play As You Like It which I borrowed from the sister of a roommate long ago in NYC, but then I found she had married and moved to Spain. I still have it, even though I have long forgotten her name.
…I have sorted the desk bookshelf and half the bedroom shelf, and yet I still have stacks and stacks of books that do not belong there and yet gaps remain on the shelves. This means that I have more yet uncreated-categories books to discover, so the remaining piles must be divided and subdivided into yet MORE categories if everything in the remaining stacks to find a home. I am in a turmoil. What is wrong with my head, if I can’t sort through my reading material and find out why I have each item? What am I doing with my life, and in particular, these books? My husband is making noises about wanting to actually sleep in the bed covered with stacks of tomes which I have attempted sorting. The tall twin bookshelves in front of my bed glare at me, the gaps in their shelves like missing teeth. Something must be done!
Then I notice that on TOP of the desk bookshelf, hidden behind some decorative cranberry sprays is a line of truly beautiful old books I had forgotten I owned. They are the sort I love with gilded covers, some with linen paper instead of wood pulp, which I put up there to be safe from the deluge of construction and moving. Suddenly I have an inspiration: I will empty the top shelves of twin bedroom bookshelves of any paperbacks and fill them with these beauties. I may not read them often but I can look at their titles daily—King Solomon’s Mines, Poems of Tennyson, Edmund Dantes, Jeanne D’Arc—and be happy. And maybe take them down and read them some evening.
One of my home decorating rules is always make the top of anything you need to look at beautiful. So this works. I feel better and go back to dusting.
Homeschooling How-Tos
There is a whole line of these beside my desk in the silver cabinet where they found refuge during the storm. They MUST go. I have over two decades worth of these. Another decision: I have never succeeded in homeschooling (one can’t master every skill) and my remaining school-age children are in a school with a set curriculum, so I no longer need most of these. There are only a few gems I really want to keep. I decide to pass most of these on to other young moms who need inspiration. Something relaxes inside me. I never thought I would find a category I could actually eliminate! The gems I want to keep are edged into the Teaching English section. I do still teach my own children English, after all.
Research Books
It turns out that this describes most of the other books I have acquired. I have books on Chesterton studies, Lewis studies, Tolkien studies, and studies for other projects. I recently stared collecting source material on the Catholic charismatic renewal and covenant communities. I somehow scarfed a rare internal copy of the new organization manual of the Bruderhof community due to this interest in lay communities.
Additionally, I have been collecting the works of Josef Ratzinger—aka Pope Benedict XVI—ever since I was asked to write a manga comic novel on his life. He’s a great writer. Among these books I do NOT find the actual comic, which is hiding upstairs, tattered and coverless. My teens have loved to death—good sign, I guess. I decide I am keeping all these source books, and notice how they are shorter in height than John Paul II’s works, which I also own. Heheh, just like the heights of the actual men.
I also have lots of fairy tales and mythology and commentaries on same, from years of bygone research. Not giving those away either.
Classical/Montessori/Etc. Home Education
Whatever your stripe or preference of education for your family, this translates somehow into EVEN MORE BOOKS. Also students tend to need their own copies, which somehow remain in your house when the students move out. Josephus, Aeschylus, Euripedes, all sorts of historical texts are stacked on my bedroom floor. Herodotus for Boys and Girls. Edith Hamilton on mythology. Texts I scooped up from giveaway piles. Hey, if the world burns down, at least my family will have a copy of The Orestia and The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, to name two recent additions I found in a pile.
And I am not yet done. Not even close.
History Books and Quotable Books
My passion. Too fat for most bookshelves. I just bought a new foot-of-the-bed bookshelf for these and am filling it with Paul Johnson and David McCullough, my favorites. Dominique LaPierre and Larry Collin’s books might become my next.
Now I have to re-evaluate the other bookcase in my room, the left hand bedside bookcase. The bookcase I brought into the marriage was owned by my grandparents and great-grandparents. My relations were poor Italian/Slovak immigrants, so most of the furniture I’ve inherited from them is inferior quality but I like it because it’s Art Deco with ancient festoons. Someday I dream of refinishing it. I decide to try to refill it with the category of “books I’m attempting to find time to read”—as distinguished from the ones I am *currently* attempting to read, which are stacked on the bookshelf headboard. My husband and I bought this bed in particular mainly because it had bookshelves on the headboard. We each have our own very random collection there.
Back to the left-hand bookshelf. I decide to move most of the poetry here plus the books I am always rushing to quote to someone, the books I refer to by the mathematically imprecise title of “The 20 best books I’ve ever read.” Again, these are a mixed bunch. Paul Johnson’s History of the Jews. (OK, I am moving him to the newly-created Paul Johnson section.) David Berlinski on mathematics. Claire Asquith on Shakespeare. Marvin Olasky on the history of abortion. A copy of Jordan Peterson an older friend gave me before she unexpectedly died which I have (willfully?) neglected to return to her family. (Maybe I should move to borrowed books—? But, death—?) Richard Barber on the Holy Grail. Norma Lear Goodrich on King Arthur. I’m now in a panic. Where is my copy of The Unintended Reformation? Such a massive and paradigm-shattering landmark book—I can’t picture loaning it out to anyone not a family member. Must find it—! These books really are my external brain.
Theology and Devotional Books
The never-ending stream. Resolution: I will return to my older practice of giving the devotional books away to friends once I’ve read them, even if they were really, really good. But there’s not only devotion. Theology—as well as liturgy and Church history—is now is going to my husband’s new research bookshelves in his office. After 30 years of marriage he finally demanded and received bookshelves all of his own. Well, at least he now has shelf space, ie: bedboards propped on brackets, which I kindly yet pragmatically installed for him. He is awaiting the actual bookshelves. At least I can move these stacks from a horizontal to a vertical position.
Decorative Books — or Books as Decor
I discover my worn copy of A Medieval Flower Garden—I love this little gift book. It’s visual poetry for me. Also also admire and dust the bookends I’ve collected. One loving bookstore owner remembered our house is named the Black Cat Inn so she bought me cast iron black cat bookends as a thank you gift for doing a booksigning at her store. How thoughtful is that? I like decorating with bookends as well as children’s toys, which to me count as a Double Morris—I both know they are useful and believe them to be beautiful. Also even though I dislike knickknacks, I have statues of cats, especially black ones, which have found me over the years and they live on the bookshelves most of the time. Sometimes my real cats knock them over.
I am also a sucker for acquiring or keeping books I would never read, because I like the covers and typesetting so much—again, professional needs result in bookshelf dangers. I have several of Wiseblood’s books sheerly for this reason. They were review copies I received which I haven’t read but I have such typesetting admiration for them that I can’t give them away.
I’m a terrible literary Catholic. I can’t stand Flannery O’Connor, am puzzled and repelled by Graham Greene, and although I have Kristin Lavransdatter on my bed bookshelf and Ron Hansen on the to-read shelf, I end up just reading Agatha Christie instead…
OK, after typing this, I finally read a random entry in the slim, beautifully covered edition of A Flower in the Heart of the Painting from Wiseblood Books and burst into tears at the final sentence. Good one. Some of you literary-loving readers should click the link and check them out.
Good thing I don’t have many coffee table books because I love these slabs of thick paper filled with excellent photography, especially ones on architecture and home decorating. Creating the Not So Big House—I adore Susan Susanka’s thought and architecture. A friend gave me a copy of this one, my favorite, which helped us renovate the said old farmhouse we now live in. It does not exactly fit on the shelf where it lives but I don’t care. I finally pulled a copy of Modern Fashion in Detail off of my back bookshelf and put it on the coffee table to make myself actually read it. (I got it in a stack of sewing and design books and only rediscovered it now.) I just added a 1969 photobook on Israel and a copy of the script of Nicholas Nickleby (where do I find all these books?) to the autumnal stack. Decorating with books is definitely a double Morris.
Big Books, Small Books, Thin Books, Tall Books
I now recognize the problem with achieving perfect organization: my bookshelves have shelves which are oddly spaced which means that many of the books must be organized not by category or color but by size. Which exacerbates the variety immensely. Ah well. Glory be to God for dappled things, right?
I also love tiny books! A friend I met while traveling gifted me her extra (!) set of the complete works of Jane Austen printed palm-sized (about the size of my phone). For years I would toss a copy into my carry-on bag whenever I flew. God bless the people who conceive of such ingenious little editions.
Old tiny books are also an obsession of my children. For years they would sneak my first edition copy of The Ballad of the White Horse—something which might just be valuable enough to kind of preserve—and use it to play old-fashioned schoolhouse. I finally had to beg them to stop and surrendered to them my copies of Julius Caesar, Plato, and yes, the aforementioned As You Like It that actually isn’t mine to be props in their Little House of the Prairie reenactments. Again, *guilt.*
Journals & Magazines
Ah, this is a recipe for eternal expansion—were I not living in the age of the death of the magazine. In my early days as a writer, I wrote for several free journals because I passionately believed in their mission: Nazareth Family Journal, spearheaded by the Michael O’Brien who was later to become the famed Catholic novelist—and Caelum et Terra. Both have since expired (and FYI I am told Caelum & Terra’s archive site was hijacked by pornographers, so don’t search it).
I am happy to have a complete set of C&T, as it was affectionately known. Their byline was like a mantra to me: Grace & Nature; Christ & Culture; Tradition & Renewal. It captured the budding of a creative Catholic renaissance in the 80s and 90s, and I am happy to have been an assistant editor for a brief time. I just paged through a few copies of Catholic Faith & Family, a more ambitious glossy that sadly did not survive the demographic losses of aging Catholics subscribers in the 2000s. Same with the exuberantly overproduced and completely fun Gilbert! magazine of the American Chesterton Society which still survives (Subscribe!) and it still publishing, which somehow feels very fitting, given that I see Chesterton as one of the tools for Culture Recovery. I have only a smattering of their issues, but love what I have. I pause to rebind the bursting magazine holders they’ve been corralled in, dust them, and return them to place of honor on the lower shelves. Let my children figure out what to do with them. I suppose this magazine-hoarding is humorously intergenerational: my own mother gifted me her 1950s collection of the Catholic CRUSADE magazine for youngsters and I cannot part with them! …Even though I have never read most of them.
I am currently stashing my copies of Ember and Soul Gardening. So glad the Soul Garden anthology (to which I contributed) is coming out soon! You can pre-order it here.
One item on my secret wish list (aka books to get if I win the lottery) is to acquire a complete set of the first two decades of Cricket children’s magazine during the years it was illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. Oh, the collecting goes on…
As I am putting the magazines back together, why, lo and behold what surfaces:
I began writing these journals by hand and eventually transcribed much of them onto the computer some time later. Well, this project at least has become more official, so I make room on my desk shelf in the “books contributed to” category.
After nearly a week of sorting books while writing this article, I am pleased to have achieved some degree of physical literary harmony in my home once more. And I wonder about why I keep all these books, most of which I freely admit I have not fully read. Women tend to extend their souls around nearly every thing they interact with—it somehow becomes a part of them. I have learned to fight against this urge with detachment and purging, but yet it is a constant factor in my life. Also these books really are an extension of my literary self: they represent past hours spent reading and pondering and often writing out the ponderings. I can’t believe that is less valuable than the thousands of emails, newsletters, and articles—yes, even on Substack—that constitute the digital paper trail of my life.
I am grateful for these books, and possessing them, with all the trouble of dusting and even moving and repairing, is still worth it. Gazing around at all of them, I somehow believe that after all, I have achieved the Good Life.
Time to make some tea.
