This summer I have purchased a rather large supply of "used" books . . . mostly discards from libraries around the country. Becky has taken to asking me to shed other titles so I can make room for these new stacks of books that are now littering the floors, the tables, the chairs. But I feel as though I am adopting these books. They need a home. And a quick glance at the old library flaps inside their jackets tells me that few people took them to the beach, or on vacation. These books seem lonely, almost bereft. But they are sadly familiar to me. I love them all.
For example, I am now the proud father of some first-edition hardback children with names like:
More Matter, by John Updike
The Collected Poems, Reynolds Price
The Colleted Poems, Stanley Kunitz
Lamentations of the Father, Ian Frazer
Couples, John Updike
A Month of Sundays, John Updike
The Indiana Way, C. Madison
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Barrel Fever, by David Sedaris
The Christmas Blizzard, by Garrison Keillor
The Collected Poems, Richard Wilbur
I have many others at home now, but these are a few of my best first-edition finds. When I leave for a few days of R & R next week, I plan to take a few of these with me to the beach. I'll get to know them. We will have conversation. And afterwards, I'll give them each a prominent place on a shelf, in a box, or in some back corner of a closet where, perhaps decades from now, I will discover them again and be able to say, "Well, long time no see . . . how have you been?"
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