Part of me never fully left that welcoming interior or abandoned that giddy joy of ownership. I wanted to own more such things, a desire that remains unabated, even in my current state of plenty. If I pass a bookstore, I want to go in. When I see an especially sweet local library, my heart swells. Used bookstores contain untold possibilities. Library sales, same thing. There is always room for more books, even though I’ve barely dented the piles I already have.
Like all collectors, I exist in a perpetual state of want that bears no reasonable relationship to the quantity of unread books mountaining up on my shelves. Places to stack them are covered as soon as they surface; I keep adding new built-in bookshelves. At this point, there is no human way that I could read even those books I’ve deliberately marked as absolute must-reads. I own many times more books than are noted in my Book of Books, yet still I worry over his empty pages. I use a minuscule type when writing in my Book of Books in order to leave room for everything that needs to go there. Bob’s pages, I used to fear, would one day run out. Now I fear I will die before I can fill them up.
This is every reader’s catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven’t read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn’t be the goal. The novelist Umberto Eco famously kept what the writer Nassim Taleb called an “anti-library,” a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one’s personal trove should contain as much of what you don’t know as possible.
Some of my particular strain of want is certainly due to early deprivation. Books were—and still are—expensive, and my mother almost never purchased them. To this day, she waits for a title to become available while her name climbs up the library wait list. I remember picture books of my childhood like The Pocket Book so well precisely because there weren’t many of them. We had Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Town and his superb I Am a Bunny (a book that forever raised my sensory expectations for the changing seasons), the high-drama Miss Suzy, the unfathomable bounty of Blueberries for Sal. Especially in the recession seventies, decades before printing became inexpensive in China, hardcover picture books were practically a luxury product. The few we owned were shared among my brothers and me. I read more books about trucks than did most girls.
In my childhood bedroom, I had one meager bookshelf whose lower rung primarily accommodated back issues of Young Miss and Seventeen. With my ten-cent second grader’s allowance, ratcheted up over the years into a weekly allotment never to exceed five dollars, I didn’t have much money for books. Sometimes, I could afford comics or massive newsprint-quality compendiums sold at the dollar store with titles like 1,001 Wacky Facts. Birthday checks were requisitioned for “college.” If I asked my mother for a book, her standard response was “Get it from the library.”
There wasn’t much you could say back to that. Our house, a creaking hulk built in 1673, had actually been our town’s first library; it had long since ceased to serve in that capacity, but we were just around the corner from the existing library, which was directly across from Main Street School. After dismissal, I’d cross the street and install myself for an hour or two.
While the library was, of course, a public institution, it felt private to me. The children’s library shelves were mine. I knew where my friends Ginny and Geneva awaited and where the slightly naughtier Klickitat gang hung out at the end of the front row. The mean kids from Deenie and Blubber looked down from the high shelf. These characters provided my social life and I never had to be told to be quiet in their presence.
I wanted to crawl into the stacks and absorb the musty smell of decades-old paper. I riffled my fingers through the wooden card-catalog drawers like they were flip books, trying to decode them. I could be the first girl to master the Dewey decimal system. I might one day know where every book stood. All I needed was some authority or at least some kind of officially sanctioned status. A few years after we’d moved to town, I mustered the courage to ask for a job.
“I’m sorry, there are no jobs available for children,” the librarian told me. I was ten.
“You wouldn’t have to pay me,” I insisted, my eyes gleaming with what surely came across as unhealthy fervor.
“That’s okay, but thank you.”
The rejection was terrible. What was it that put the children’s librarian off my candidacy? Was it the you-don’t-have-to-pay-me part? Did she question my intentions? Did she not see that I was a book person, different from other, more casual library visitors, that I cared? That I would never leave a book facedown with its spine splayed open like other kids my age. I couldn’t help but feel they were taking me down a notch. “This library isn’t yours, you know,” is how I heard it.
Every once in a while, I’d gin up the pluck to inquire again, thinking maybe they wouldn’t remember me from the last time. Sometimes asking at the children’s library, other times going to the person at checkout with the enviable task of scanning each book through the ghostly red glow of the primitive computer system. These requests were always swiftly rebuffed, and each time I felt sorry for having had the temerity to ask. Perhaps they knew I was reading beyond my jurisdiction; someone in charge must have seen me with the Sweet Dreams.
Because the library limited the number of books you could check out at a time, I developed fantasies about coming into a large quantity of books. Our house had a basement whose walls crumbled at the touch. (Murderers lurked in the dark spaces behind staircases, and after seeing Friday the 13th at far too young an age I knew they were waiting to reach through and grab my ankles.) But there were untended boxes down there, too, and they might be filled with books if only I dared look. The other probable stash was in the allegedly inaccessible attic, a place we never once entered during our fourteen years in that house. Stowed away up there, I believed, was an immense trove of Archie comics and other goodies, perpetually kept out of reach.