Books Help

Astronautte Mir on my desk at the thrift store, below.
Do I ever miss that messy desk!

The Peak Doll Directory (1971) is still there, waiting for me to come back to work.
I know someone bought Victory though, with its Edward Gorey cover. I know because I later kicked myself for not buying it and checked the shelves for it.
99 cents. Not that the store gets many collectors, but of course it sold.

I haven't wanted to collect books from the store. It's been enough to keep them on my desk for a while, and then pass them along.
But after almost two months off work, away from the books, I wonder if I want to start collecting the ones I like...
After all, I won't always be at the store. If I live long enough, eventually I'll retire?

At any rate, I do wish I'd bought every Edward Gorey cover that's come through (ten or so). Gorey designed fifty book covers for Doubleday Anchor between 1953 and 1960 [via article on collecting Gorey from the NYRB].

When I go back, I will definitely start buying them when they appear.

Meanwhile, I'm reading The Librarian of Auschwitz by Spanish author Antonio Iturbe (2012; translated into English, 2017).

It's based on Iturbe's interviews with Dita Kraus, (b. Dita Polachova, 1929--she's still alive). In 1944, when she was fourteen, Dita became the secret keeper of eight books smuggled into the children's block at Auschwitz*. 
She also knew the book people in the "living library"--those who knew books well enough to retell them.

There's no comparison between the coronavirus and the organized human cruelty that gave people like Mengele free rein.
I'm having a hard time formulating this idea,  
. . . but maybe some similar questions arise when the ground of normalcy drops out from under you (even if the magnitude is different)?
How do people maintain themselves under threat? What helps? What matters?

In a recent survey in the UK, 40 percent of people said that books have helped them get through the lockdown, according to an article in The Guardian.
Reading The Librarian in Auschwitz helps me. 
It's grim and frightening to read about humans at their viral worst.
But reading about Jewish resistance inside the camps--well, it's too facile to say it's "inspiring". But it's important, and something we don't hear much about, or I haven't anyway.

"Dita caressed the books. They were broken and scratched, worn, with reddish patches of mildew; some were mutilated. But without them, the wisdom of civilization might be lost.... They were precious.
She would protect them with her life."

* See the Wikipedia article on Fredy Hirsch, the Jewish supervisor of the [doomed] children's block at Auschwitz. I had no idea of this history. 

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Reading The Librarian in Auschwitz in bed last night, someone (besides a girlette) kept me company:

Dog is affectionate and happy to see everybody (mostly), but since I've been walking him around the lake this spring, he seems fonder of me.
For the first time, lying next to me on the bed, he put his paw over my hand.

I took my hand away.
I put my hand back.
Again, he put his paw over it.

We have reached the hand-holding stage.