Thoughts on books

I learned to read when I was three.  I think it may have been a mistake, as far as minimalism goes, to allow a child to learn to read so early.  I grew up out in the country where there were no other little girls to play with.  I could only take so much playing with the rough and tumble boys in my neighborhood and most of the time they didn't want a girl, especially a prissy girl who talked about books and knitting all the time, hanging around with them.  Sadly, I was shot with a BB gun more times than I care to recount.  And then during ninth grade I was ill for quite some time and the only thing I had energy for was propped up in bed with my nose in a book.  Even holding a book was tiring sometimes.  I've been a librarian, a bookseller, a wife to someone who loves books almost as much as I do, and the mother of three children who have their own growing collections of beloved books. 

I have quite a collection of beloved books.  My first ever copy of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.  The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.  The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare.  To name a few.  When I first learned to read there was Junior Elf Book called Kate and Kitten which I adored.  Somewhere along the line my mother threw it out because it was "so worn."  I looked for years for that book.  I searched through yard sales, antique shops, rare book stores, online book dealers, and finally Amazon where I found a copy in decent condition.  I bought it.  Oddly, reading it when you are forty-seven years old is much different from reading it when you are three years old.  I found it quite juvenile and the writing was a bit belittling to children.  Also, the father in the story always had a pipe in his mouth, something you would not find in 2013, but was quite common in 1965 when the book was published.  But then this was a dime store book and cost a whopping 59¢.  (Just a note, I remember when the Berenstain Bears father used to smoke a pipe, but newer edition of those books have omitted the pipe.)  So while the book is not great work of literature, it does house fabulous memories for me.  Perhaps my love of this book had more to do with it being one of the first books I could actually read on my own rather than some great story.

There is also a classification of books that I call Sacred.  I'm not talking about Bibles, Korans, or Books of Shadows.  I'm talking about books that I feel should be revered because of their age, their information, their bindings, and their weight.  I have two such books in my collection.  One is Handbook of Heraldry By John E. Cussens.  It was published in 1893 and is still in gorgeous condition.  It looks like a book should look.  It has an olive fabric binding with gold lettering and detailing.  The heraldic roses that decorate this books are actually embossed and it still has the translucent onion skin sheets between print and plates.  The other book I have is called Forme of Cury.  The imprint that I have is from 1791.  It is a cookbook from the time of King Richard II (not to be confused with Richard III who was buried under a parking lot). 

This is what it says on the inside plate:

The
Forme of Cury,

A Roll
Of
Ancient English Cookery,
Compiled, about A.D. 1390, by the
Master-Cooks of King Richard II,
Presented afterwards to Queen Elizabeth,
by Edward Lord Stafford,
and now in the Possession of Gustavus Brander, Esq.
Illustrated with Notes,
And a copious Index, or Glossary.

 

My copy looks newer than my heraldry book and I absolutely love it.  I have also cooked some of the recipes from this book including "Gourdes in Pottage" and "bukkanade." Bukkanade is this sort of greyish stuff that looks like it was cooked during the Middle Ages and left out on the counter for six hundred years before serving.  But it tastes rather well.  In the whole medieval foods kind of way.  Actually medieval food mostly all tastes quite well because no matter when you lived if food didn't taste good people wouldn't eat it.  Some of the spices and combinations of ingredients are foreign to our twenty-first century palate, but they aren't bad.  It's not like eating old kimchi.  (I know, I'm going to get slammed for that one, but I just cannot stomach kimchi or haggis for that matter.) 

Then there are books that you feel indebted to keep.  The first editions of Harry Potter (books 1-7).  The book your friend wrote (which was good, truly).  The book you inadvertently stole from a library over twenty years ago (I didn't realize it got packed when we moved cross country and just found it a couple years ago).  And the books your children gnawed on as they learned to love books.  Some books will always be kept such as my collection of Winnie the Pooh books.  But others?  Do I really need to keep all the J. R. Ward Black Dagger Brotherhood books?  Will I really read them again?  Not to mention that I have them already on my Nook.  So why do I need a paper copy of them?  And what about the seven boxes of science fiction books?  Or the books that seemed interesting and were only half read?  I am quite sure I will never get around to finishing them.  There are too many books on my ever growing list of Must Reads to go back and finish a book that I was only halfheartedly reading while waiting for something better to come along.   And all the ARC's (Advanced Readers Copies) that I took home from work because they were free and the premise looked interesting and might be worth reading some day.  

Those are some of the things that I will need to keep in mind.  And hopefully, as I start digging through these boxes of books, I won't get distracted and start reading.  Which is why my collection never truly gets weeded.