Bookleggers Unite

Every child is predisposed to love a good story and to see his or her world as part of a larger story. I was no different and in many ways I remain a child whose delight in stories has only increased with age. Wherever there is happiness and peace in the landscape of my memory, a book is there. Upon the timeline of my soul’s growth outward and upward, wherever it has blossomed with sudden spurts, there you will surely find a book that has nourished the soil of my soul. Even as a boy, I knew that Elie Wiesel was right: “story is the vessel for carrying meaning. It is the currency of human interchange, the net we cast to capture fugitive truths and the darting rabbits of emotion” (Elie Wiesel, The Gates of the Forest).

If you are prone to need solutions, prone to leave blame at someone’s feet for the bibliophile that is me, then you need look no further than my mother and my father. They believed with Wiesel that “God made man because he loves stories” (ibid) and, therefore, when we love stories, we love God back. I was born into a land of books. They were piled high about me; sometimes on the floor, sometimes resting on old bits of wood held up on either side by even older bricks-the boards would bow at the middle under the burden. I could turn in no direction that did not have some vision of book-land. At least, that was how it appeared to me as a child. Now it is quite likely that my parents did not have as many books as I recall-that is the mystery of a child’s mind-but they had enough to sustain a lasting impression of books everywhere. Though I did not fall in love with the books till I was nearly nine years of age, they were always present, gradually working upon my affections like water upon stone.

My father’s voice, round and ripe with vowels, still resounds in my mind as I recall doodling on precious paper while sprawled out on the red dyed concrete floor of our home in Africa. He spoke into my life the stories of Narnia and of Middle Earth, the lamp post and The Shire, as the warm Africa nights settled outside. My little sister was usually nearby, also doodling, my little brother curled under the coffee table with the cat and her kittens-he fell asleep quickly. There was something mysterious and distant about the stories back then; perhaps it was Africa, perhaps it was simply the fruit of that potent age between five and ten when everything looms large. In either case, the flooring of my heart was books before the walls of my mind were ornamented by them.

Certainly, something in my mind ran parallel to Annie Dillard who asked, “Why are we reading, if not in the hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? …Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?” (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life). Indeed, we all long for meaningfulness the child no less than the adult. Stories are one conduit of meaningfulness. My love for stories was something visceral long before that love became intellectual and while I have gained some intellectual reference points in the past 30 years, books still have a very poignantly visceral hold on my heart.

I am a man cursed with the subversive and vague fear of every bibliophile who hopes his children will not sell all his books at a mindless garage sale. I am a man who, deep down in his being, takes great pride in being what Walter M. Miller, Jr. called a “booklegger”: a man who scurries into every garage sale where there might be some orphaned texts with ornate bindings and scuttles back home to hole them away for the day when the sun will finally peek out and the world will be filled with newly awakened young men and women who leave their shiny gadgets to desire something old again.

Let us jettison the glib in exchange for the glorious.