"I Treat My Books As I Treat My Friends and Ask Only
That You Treat Them Well and See Them Safely Home."
So friends they are indeed. Once a book's been read and enjoyed, laughed about, cried over, I cannot part with them. True, some are better than others (much like people we know) but they live on and exist in our hearts and minds and shelves for very long and lingering times throughout our--and their--lives. How can we not love books? They're edifying, colorful, sculptural decor and far easier on the eye than a Kindle, no doubt. Imagine empty shelves in a library with but half a dozen Kindles containing the world's books. Efficient, yes very, but hardly aesthetic.
A source of joy is walking into a library or book shop; better yet, walking into someone's personal library and perusing the shelves to discover worlds and adventures we've never known. As for my own library, I love the look of my well-loved books domiciled happily on their shelves. Despite that I've devoured most of them with my peripatetic eye, and are loathe to say good-bye to them, I look on them with gentleness, fondness, and a quiet smile. My own personal library holds everything from first editions, leather-bound classics, dog-eared paperbacks, chick-lit from Austen to Kinsella, bios on everyone from actor Rupert Everett to Edward Everett Hale. Add to that travelogues, coffee table books, screenplays, recipe books from the diplomatic corps to soul food menus to varieties of bubble and squeak, special books my friends have written, my own, and that of my sister's volume on our family history lovingly titled, "I Can't Help It . . . I'm Italian."
I also admire and reread every so often, my red volumes of Nathaniel Hawthorne's works. Since I live in Salem and just a couple blocks from the House of the Seven Gables, I've no excuse for not being a major fan. There on my bookshelves reside Hester Prynne, crimson A on her bosom, to both romances Dolliver and Blythesdale, The Marble Faun, the Maule and Pyncheon families in that gabled house and Twice Told Tales. Each one resurrects the magic it conjured and held for me when I read them as a teenager just as they do today. I salute you, Mr. Hawthorne for making Salem in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries come well and truly alive for me as I spend my later years in this beloved place, just down the street from those seven gables in old Salem.
"Half-way down a by-street of one of our New England towns, stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely-peaked gables,
facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge,
clustered chimney in the midst."
