Broken Hearted Book Lover

Yesterday was Labor Day and also Metereological Autumn. It was also a day when with my sister's help, I let go of over half a dozen books from my vast book collection. I have been a book lover since my earliest days and I even have the first book I ever bought, a begining reader that I bought at Leary's Book Store off Market Street in Philadelphia when I was just old enough to begin reading. Once I began, it was an endless love affair, my longest and most intense.

But like all my love affairs, this one had to come to an end. Each phase of my life was cocooned in a spun collection of books on the subject. Here is one of my early ones: When I was 16, I took my babysitting money to a book store in the Cherry Hill Mall. There was a 'sales' table and for $4.95, I bought an Art book of the lithographic works of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec. I fell deeply in love. Neither he nor I could have imagined that twenty years later, I would be in college studying Lithography as my major towards an Art degree. His lithographic posters were the shining city on a hill, the holy grail, the gold paved streets that inspired my journey. I couldn't help wondering, today, how Lautrec would feel to know that a woman in the far - over a hundred years distant future would be studying lithography because of his poster art. I think he would be astonished and pleased.

The reason I am divesting myself of my huge library is that I am losing my vision to Fuch's Dystrophy, a cornea disease. I can still paint and watch tv on my laptop, and drive, but I can't read without such a struggle (necessitating a magnifying glass) that it has no pleasure. My forlorn collections have sat gathering dust for a decade now, which was surely never their purpose in the world, so I decided to set them free.

Another reason I was divesting myself of my library NOW was that I have a connection with the Free Books Project which was originally located at the Newton Friends Meeting House in Camden when I began taking my books there. They give away gooks for free to anyone who wants them. At the time it was a community charitable venture that allowed Newton Friends Meeting to qualify for an archhitectural grant for repairs to the very very old Quaker Meeting House. The grant required that the building be engaged in a beneficial community program, so The Free Books Project was perfect. The Free Books Project is no longer there. Now they operate as pop-up libraries all over the city of Camden, especially in conjunction with other community events.

Knowing my books were going to such a worthy cause, helped me part with them. I liked to think that someone who didn't have the money to buy a book or access to a book store or a library could have a book to read. So many of my passions were between those covers.

Gone With The Wind: The film had such a powerful effect on me for so many reasons it could be an essay on its own. I loved it so much that I read the book many times, then the biography of Margaret Mitchel, then all the sequels written to follow the characters after the ending of the original book. Then I found a very old copy of the Civil War novel that inspired Margaret Mitchell. I can't remember the title now, something with "Drums" in it and if I remember correctly it was written by the granddaughter of a Confederate General, inspired by his memories of his war experience.

My years as a volunteer at Red Bank Battlefield in National Park, inspired an entire shelf in my floor to ceiling and wall to wall bookcase in my bedroom. First I read all the traditional histories, then novels of the battles, then diaries of the veterans like Joseph Plum Martin, and even two or three memoirs by Hessian soldiers, and I was inspired to seek out the three or four burial sites of some of the Hessian soldiers who died on the retreat after the Battle of Red Bank in October of 1777. And the WOMEN! I read the historical accounts of the "Camp Followers" and the memoirs of loyalists who lost everything, and female spies like Patience Wright (maybe she was a relative, maybe not) who was also a renowned sculptor.

For several years after retirement and during my long love affair with history, I gave talks for the Camden County Historical Society on the Underground Railroad. The Civil War and the Underground Railroad filled another 12 foot long shelf with stories of escape and valor, of suffering and success and led me on many hunts to spirit haunted places in my South Jersey landscape, like Saddler's Woods, or Ambury cemetery in Othello, Greewidh, NJ.

All these friends, companions, fire-starters got boxed up into cartons from a local liquor store and carted off to the Free Books Project. Goodbye to Harriet Tubman and Quakers serving in the Union Army, and Abraham Lincoln and Mrs. Lincoln and her dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley and Ona Judge who was never caught.

On the way home along Kings Highway from Clarksboro, I had a sudden squall of emotional pain and broke down in tears. But, I had to keep reminding myself, what is the use of keeping all those dusty books on the shelf when I can't read them. Surely that is both greedy and sinful.

S, now, the bottom shelf of all my collection of health books of the type of BLUE ZONES, and books on vegetarian cooking, heart disease, and other ailments like diabetes and kidney disease, are all out on the streets hopefully finding their way into the hands of someone who needs them. Now, all my Revolutionary War books are gone, and my Civil War books. And my Irish Literature books are all gone incuding a really old hard back of the works of Lady Gregory which I hated to part with. It was falling apart and I was afraid no one would understand what a treasure it was. I can still feel the damp, wet fog of the Irish night as the prisoner of one of her majesties torturous prisons makes his escape and cautiously ventures his signal to the dark figure waiting by the river, whom he hopes is the fellow rebel sent to help him. That scene is from one of her plays.

My novels went early and I can't even remember when I boxed and sent them on their way down the river of life. They may have been the second offering.

With foreboding I think there may be a bookcase in my dark and dreaded attic with all my poetry books in it. My Women's History went some years ago to the Alice Paul Institute Library.

The last to go will be my Art book collection in the floor to ceiling shelving unit my father buit into the wall at the foot of the attic steps. Those books I hold onto with the hope that the South Jersey Art Alliance will flourish in the Underwood Building of the Woodbury Friends Meeting grounds and that I can bequeath those books to them.

There are still three full shelves twleve feet long with New Jersey history, and a half shelf in the back room with coffee table books on Scotland and Ireland from my trip there and the following years of fascinating with all things Irish (my mother's people, after all, came from there!)

Well, now that I have gotten that off my chest, I feel a little better. I am reminded OFTEN of the Catherine Davis Poem, "After a time all losses are the same, and we go stripped the way we came."

When I left home at 18, I burned my yearbook in my family's backyard 'trash burning can' which we were allowed to have in those days, and when I left Philadelphia for New Jersey, I left all my college art portfolios and sketch pads. When I got divorced, I lost all my record albums and my entire collection of the books and magazines of the Second Wave Feminist Movement, books like The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch and dozens of one-of-a-kind magazines printed on University presses and early copies of Ms. magazine.

Well, pets have died, romances have faded, and even my daughter has grown and moved far away. Grandparents die, parents die, uncles and aunts and cousins die. Old schools close, I have lost my beauty and my agility, my youthful vigor and my vision, and I am losing my hearing. As I approach the toll gate on the last road before the final big adventure, I suppose it is natural that I leave all these things of the material world behind. It is like a sinking ship; who cares for gold and silver, fine clothes and furnishings when the sea is about to swollow you. Still, it is just as natural to mourn the passing of old friends and my books were old friends, really old lovers, and great companions. I wish them all loving discoverers on their journey into the wider world outside my dusty shelves.

Happy Trails - in ink and on paper.

wrightj45@yahoo.com