Book Collectors

My mother recently moved from a four bedroom house she had been in for 17 years to three bedroom condo. While packing, she encountered books in odd corners of her house, as if they were sneaking off to secretly multiply. Many of her books were my grandfathers, and they are interesting for their viewpoints (as in the book from Concordia Lutheran arguing against Darwinism from 1918) and just their age.

We have a bookshelf in our office, and Luke loves to take the books off the shelf and try to put them back on. Off and on, until he leaves their covers strewn about and the books in hodge podge piles. I hate to see the books abandoned in harmful positions, and cleaning them up daily gets old very quick. So I began a book hunt and re-organize throughout the house, consolidating our books to our barrister bookcase and putting textbooks into hidden storage.

Both Esposo and I were avid childhood readers, and our book collections - just the sheer number of them - reflect that. I joined a Bookcrossing group to obtain free books AND pass on books that I had read. And even though I've been actively moving books out of our house, there are easily two hundred throughout. Esposo even cut an opening in a book of ee cummings poetry where he placed my engagement ring.

Before you scoff because you have many more books, reread the point where I say I've been ACTIVELY moving books OUT of our house. Books sneak in through windows and are dropped off by relatives. Serious, deep, "meaningful" books make crazy mad book love to produce fluffy chicklit. Historical fact filled books meet the chicklit and out come historical romances.

A couple friends say they are collecting libraries, they save the books they read and line them up on shelves. I have visions of the weight of these books crashing through floors or of building forts with paperbacks. But I want Luke to grow up in a house of books, I remember walking around my house on boring rainy days and finding books from my parent's collection to read. I'm collecting the children's books we've kept - Shel Silverstein and Beverly Cleary, Madeline L'Engle and Roald Dahl - and putting them together on a shelf where Luke will be able to find them. But the rest of it, the in progress books, the read and done books, they're still looking for a home, and hopefully it will be somebody else's home!!