books about books

Parnassus on Wheels, by Christopher Morley

by

When I was in Madrid in the 1990s, walking the streets in the evening, I glanced down a short, dead-end alley and was astonished by what I saw. Earlier in the day I’d visited the book stalls lining the Cuesta de Moyano, a small pedestrian street by El Retiro Park, and thought myself in heaven. So many books! So many book lovers!

Now, though, in that dim alley, I saw a young man grasp the bottom of a wooden board hanging on the stone wall and lift it to reveal shelves of  books. He propped the board up to be an awning and was ready for business.

Not only was I charmed by this unexpected bookshop and wished I could change places with him—what a life that would be!—but I was also reminded of a story I’d read twenty-some years earlier. In it a man had made a horse-drawn wagon, something like a Romany vardo, with sides that opened to reveal shelves of books. He traveled about the countryside selling books to farmers and townsfolk and “evangelizing” about the delights of reading.

Published in 1917, Morley’s novella is about Helen, a former governess who cooks and keeps house for her bachelor brother Andrew on their farm. Ever since Andrew started writing books and unexpectedly became famous, she’s become disenchanted with her life, left alone on the farm while he travels about giving readings and looking for inspiration.

Then one day Roger Mifflin drives his traveling bookshop into their farmyard. A short, balding man with a red beard, he has a gift for holding forth on the wonders of books and life on the road. However, he’s now decided to retire and sell his creation, and he thinks Andrew is just the person to take his place.

So does Helen. Foreseeing many more months of being left to tend the farm alone, she takes the remarkable step of buying the Traveling Parnassus herself. Though only 39 and a self-described “fat old woman,” she’s inspired to kick over the traces and set out on a bookselling trip herself.

They decide that she’ll drive Roger to the train station which will take a few days, and along the way he’ll tutor her in the business. As she and Roger travel the New England country roads, adventures ensue.

It’s been more than fifty years since I first read this delightful, old-fashioned story. I’d forgotten the details of those adventures, but I’ve never forgotten Roger’s joyous literary orations or the Traveling Parnassus itself. I’ve never forgotten my dream of a life surrounded by books and sharing them with others.

If you’re looking for something that reminds you of the joy that life holds, The Parnassus on Wheels is a great place to start.

Have you reread a book from your youth and found it better than ever? Did it change your life?

Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman

by

Ex Libris

An ardent reader who still remembers the glorious moment when I first decoded the black marks in a Golden Book and found a story waiting for me, I love books. And I love books about books.

This is the first of several essay collections from Fadiman, former editor of The American Scholar and a founding editor of the Library of Congress magazine Civilization. She will be speaking at the Brattleboro Literary Festival in October. The essays here are about books—loving books, living with them, building castles with them.

In the first selection, Fadiman describes the hilarious and tender process of marrying her and her husband’s libraries after five years of marriage. First they had to negotiate how the books would be placed on the shelf. Like Fadiman, I organize my books by nationality and subject matter, while her husband lumped all under the heading Literature. And George could have been talking to me when he gasped and said, “‘You mean we’re going to be chronological within each author?’”

But it was having to give up duplicate copies that brought home to Fadiman that they “had both been hoarding redundant copies of our favorite books ‘just in case’ we ever split up.” She realized that taking this giant step meant that they were “stuck together for good.”

One essay explores inscriptions in books given as gifts while another hilariously exploits the charm and eccentricity of footnotes. To me, the most moving selection is about her father’s library, evoking memories of my own childhood. My love affair with books started early and quickly grew from valuing them as transportation devices to appreciating them as physical objects.

Like Fadiman, I look at bookshelves in homes I visit. She says, “My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents’ tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closets. Their selves were on their shelves.”

In the realm of Creative Nonfiction, personal essays have one foot in the province of memoir and the other in narrative nonfiction. By including personal details, they share some of the power of memoir and the way it welcomes the reader in. At the same time, they can convey bits of knowledge like tasty morsels hidden in a cake.

Fadiman is particularly adept at bringing in abstruse and amusing bits of information. Before now, I didn’t know that “Galileo compared Orlando Furioso to a melon field, Coventry Patmore compared Shakespeare to roast beef, and Edward Fitzgerald compared Thucydides to Parmesan cheese.” Nor did I know that William Gladstone invented the system of rolling bookshelves used in Bodleian Library’s Radcliffe Camera and other places, including some archives I’ve explored.

Most of all, though, the personal essay is a story and, as such, takes the reader on a journey. The journey may end in an epiphany or a comforting hug or a sad acceptance, but always in a satisfying way. Each of these small journeys rewards the reader with insights, images, and a chuckle or two.

What book about books have you read?