Books from my earlier life have always shown up at my workplace, but only recently have I started to buy any of them for myself.
Over the years, I'd gotten rid of all but a short shelfful of my books. Now, at sixty-two, I seem to have started some reclamation project of my past, including framing one of my oldest family photos (post below this one).
BELOW: My mother cooked out of the original Betty Crocker cook book in a three-ring binder. This is a bound reprint.
I've never actually read archy and mehitabel, but I remember staring at the illustrations in my parent's paperback--they're by George Herriman, who drew Krazy Kat.
On Christmas Eve, we'd read The Night Before Christmas illustrated by Arthur Rackham (above).
On Christmas Day, we listened to the LP record of Dylan Thomas reading A Child's Christmas in Wales.
"Would you like something to read?"
The three books were my parents' choices. I discovered C. W. Anderson's horse books--including the Blaze series––on my own. I mostly got them from the library, and I drew horses, copying Anderson's style.
I was so excited to own a copy of Heads Up, Heels Down, his instruction book on horse riding--hardback with an orange dust jacket. I think it was a birthday present--maybe for my tenth birthday?
I've ordered a couple other books from my past off ebay, inexpensively. The cheapest copy of Heads Up, however, is around $25 with tax and shipping. I don't want to pay that much. I'm not trying to rebuild my entire bookshelf.
Also, I prefer the serendipity of thrift store donations.
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These books, below, for instance, I never would have searched out, except maybe Star Trek 2 from my teen years. It's one of a series of novelizations (short-storyzations) of the show's episodes, by James Blish. I didn't care about the stories--I was delirious to have this cover photo of Spock and Kirk, in particular--back when you couldn't easily find photos of old TV shows.
ABOVE:
The Country Between Us I discovered in my early forties, when I rewrote a geography book for
middle-schoolers about El Salvador (contract work I did for a decade for a children's book publisher). I was going to quote a famous line
from the poem "The Visitor", but it's too grim. You may know it already. (NYT review of Forché's book.)
Sixteen Pleasures (1994) and Towers of Trebizond (1956) are from the first, happy years of knowing Oliver, in my early thirties, before we started an affair. They are, however, both about affairs....
I'd recommended Sixteen Pleasures to him, ostensibly because it's about book restoration after the Florence flood.
And he gave me a copy of Towers before a trip I took to Turkey, which is about traveling there. I brought it along.
Towers's opening line:
"'Take my camel, dear', said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."
Aunt Dot's full name is Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett. The book's like that, and so was Oliver.
Hm, looking at the Wikipedia article makes me want to read that again--I haven't in twenty-five years...
It's difficult to call up feelings of happiness, or even love, toward people when things have ended very badly--for me, that means Oliver and my mother.
I remember that I did love them very much, but I rarely feel anything pleasant when I think of them now.
These books I've collected help in both cases.
Whereas it's easy to call up a pleasant and fond feeling for my father, whom I didn't love deeply. My worst years with my father were all before I was twenty-five. After that we had a cordial relationship, with some moments of true connection.
I graduated from college in 1996 with a BA in Classics, when I was thirty-five. (I thought I was sooooo old.) In celebration, my father gave me an antique, leather-bound book in Greek (I don't remember what it was), and a check for a hundred dollars. I no longer have the note he'd written to go along with the gifts, but I remember what he'd written:
"There are few times in life when a person can be genuinely proud. This is one of them."
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