It was not an uncommon way to spend a Saturday night when our kids were young. We would go out for an early dinner, often to a diner or IHOP. Then we would head to Borders or Barnes & Noble and browse for books. Everyone got to pick out something they liked, be it fiction or history, comic or biography. And if the weather was right we would cap it off with a visit to a local ice cream place. In our world it was the perfect way to while away an evening.
Our kids are long gone from our home but we still enjoy Saturday nights out, though more than likely with friends, and usually at slightly better restaurants. Regardless of the season ice cream at a local spot is still high on the list. What has changed is that after the meal and before the cones we no longer make a stop to add to our library.
The fact is we couldn't even if we wanted to. The large chain establishments that sold books barely exist anymore. Borders went belly up in 2011, and while Barnes and Noble is in the middle of an expansion, it slashed its footprint around 2018 and only recently returned to our area. And while there are still some small independent book stores, they are generally not open late on weekend nights. Add to that the 9000-pound gorilla that is Amazon. While publications represent just 10% of its total today, when it started in 1995 it billed itself as "Earth's Biggest Bookstore," and we are more likely to browse its virtual aisles.
We also made the switch from paper to digital. Starting with my first Sony version to our current 11th generation Kindles, we swapped hard and soft covers for slim tablets that at last count have over 400 titles on each. Mine you, it's not so much a preference for the form and format – I still love the feel and smell of reading on paper – as much as a marriage of convenience. Besides simply running out of shelf space, the tablet enables me to carry multiple options when I travel in a fraction of the space. It also hurts way less when I drop it on my face as I fall asleep reading in bed.
All that means that our shelves are like a bug frozen in amber. Yet even as they ceased to expand I still loved our collection – the look, the smell, the colors, the shapes. They were a tangible representation of different worlds and ideas, covering a long history of crawling between the pages and losing myself. On our shelves are books I got from my dad and gifts from friends and family, not to mention a smorgasbord we acquired of fiction and biography, how-to and history. Our kids inherited the same bug, filling shelves in their rooms with their personal preferences, as well as pilfering select volumes from our main stash. And yes, between the two are well-thumbed copies of all seven Harry Potter novels, as well as several duplicates to cut down on the "My turn!"
Still, the time has come to start pruning that tree. Not that we have immediate or even not-so-immediate plans to go anywhere, but we know that sooner or later it behooves us to lighten our load. And in terms of volume and impact, the books are low hanging fruit: easy to pack, not accessed on any regular basis, not integral to our daily existence. And so I box up stories by Ken Haruf and biographies by Robert Caro, histories by David McCullough and thrillers by Jeffrey Archer. I hope they find a home with some inquisitive person even as I speculate they will more likely be sold for scrap by the pound.
I won't lie: it hurts in a way that parting with a pair of old pants doesn't. We were brought up to treat books as revered objects, ones that offered us a chance to glimpse into worlds and minds that we admired. It's true that they were merely the carrier for ideas and not the ideas themselves; giving them away doesn't mean those thoughts are gone. Indeed, we have access to them almost instantly through a multitude of platforms, in a manner far easier than plucking a dusty tome from a shelf. Still, I'll keep a few as a way to remind myself of a more tangible way to visit a wider world.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves to read. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
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