–Holbrook Jackson
This is the quote on the back of my business cards.
Shelves of books in my life, carefully boxed and transported from one place to another, are from my college days. From my days as a Women’s Studies major when titles such as “Lesbian Ethics” were de rigeur to my Chinese primer from the one semester of Chinese language of which I was so proud.
My bookshelf was a demonstration of my beliefs, of what I was interested in, who I was, where I’d been, where I was going. Mostly textbooks or novels or histories bought for classwork, they were the most tangible evidence of my present and my past. Chaucer. Thousands of pages on 20th century Chinese history and biography. Eighteenth century British poets. Isben.
The books were also boastful. They contained titles I’d never read and in the portrait business that’s like whitening your teeth with an air brush.
You see offices where people have a lifetime of books. I thought I was the same way. I recently realized that those college books that felt so important for so long aren’t anymore. I’m in a different phase of my life these years later, I don’t need my bookshelves to speak for me, and I don’t need to store books I’m not going to read again.
I certainly did not get rid of everything. I was an English and Women’s Studies major for good reasons and many of the books remain something I want to have nearby – a reach away. Books I want to know that I can simply walk to a shelf and pick up whenever I want to. Raymond Carver. Gloria Naylor. Katherine Philips. Ayn Rand. Three translations of the Koran.
And Stephen King and John Sandford. I weeded my recreational reading too. And I kept all the Stephen King and John Sandford.
The books that are sale-able I’m giving to local library whose friends group can see some cash from them. The “edgy” and “cool” titles I’m taking to Dawn Treader in Ann Arbor where I’ll take store credit for them. Always something interesting in Dawn Treader for someone looking to shed light on the portrait of their age.
Plum Librarian LLC 