The Four-Foot Shelf

“You’ve got to do something about these books”, my wife announced once more. Looking around I could see she was right. A stack here. A stack there. On top of the desk. On top of the nightstand. On the coffee table, the end tables, even stacked on the floor in the less trafficked areas of our home. There were books everywhere. We have four large bookcases in various rooms, all spilling over. I’d love to have some nice floor to ceiling bookcases built and mounted to the wall of our office/study, but that would require the hassle of having a stranger working in the house. It would interrupt my reading. Not to mention, custom bookshelves can’t be cheap, and I could spend that money on more books.

So, I set about gathering up the required materials from the local home improvement store; five 4-ft. pine boards, some back walnut stain, and some “L” brackets. Once home, though I am far from the handiest person on the planet, I stained the boards, measured out the placement and screwed holes for fastening the “L” brackets, fastened the works together, and created some shelf space. A simple design. Three shelves held together by two supporting sides. This little shelf won’t be nearly enough, but it will buy me some time and maybe a few brownie points. Let the shelving begin.

You might say I have a problem. At least my wife thinks so. But, how can one have enough books? They’re a repository of knowledge, experience, adventure, and wisdom. They are solace. They are old friends. Wendell Berry, Wilson Rawls, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Flannery, Twain, McCarthy, Stegner, Leopold, Harrison, Mary Oliver, Bill Bryson, Zora Neal Hurston, Stephen Bodio, L’Amour, Lopez, McPhee, McMurtry, Ed Abbey, Ted Koozer, David Bottoms, Sean Dietrich, Elmer Kelton, Ron Rash, Larry Brown, Brian Doyle, Vonnegut, Tocqueville, Montaigne, Chesterton, Ernest J. Gaines, Norman Maclean, Lewis Grizzard, Rick Bass, Rick Bragg, and many more. Collectively, they are me.

At the bottom of the dark cave of memory, as far back as I can see, my mother reads to me from a book of stories about Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, John Henry, and Johnny Appleseed. That’s where the fire was sparked. I was amazed to learn of the other worlds held between the pages of a book. Later, I found stories of Houdini, The Wright Brothers, and Benjamin Franklin in the Childcraft Encyclopedias. And then one day, my 5^th grade teacher introduced us to “Where The Red Fern Grows”. I have been reading ever since.

Today, I try to keep one fiction and one non-fiction book going at all times. At this pace, it takes me about two to three weeks to read two 300-400 page books. I find that if I am reading less than two, I get kind of fidgety. Heaven forbid, if I find myself without anything to read. Books have become a necessary part of my daily life. But why? What is it about books that causes all this?

For all my complaints about the times in which we live, it’s a great time to be a reader. Books are easily accessible in many places—libraries, bookstores, online. You can have nearly any title you can think of in your hands in a matter of days. However, that requires a lot of filtering. Google’s latest tally of the world’s book titles is 129,864,880. There’s not enough time for them all nor would anyone necessarily want to read them all. We each have our own interests. I remember hearing that if you’re 30 years old and live to the age of 82, you will read only 2600 titles over those 52 years if you are a “voracious reader”, reading 50 books per year. Thus, it pays to be selective.

Lots of people out there just don’t enjoy reading. I acknowledge and accept that fact but I still don’t understand it, just as they probably can’t understand why I want to read as I do. But, there’s so much out there to discover. Within books I find many other lives I do not have the time to live myself and many thoughts I am too busy or too dim-witted to think of on my own.

Sometimes I’m interested in a particular subject and I’ll try to devour information on that topic. But, when reading for pleasure, I’m on a quest for a book that not only fulfills a certain curiosity, but one that fits a particular mood or atmosphere. You might say I look for books that have a feeling. After all, aren’t all experiences about feeling?

I read fiction and non-fiction at the same time because sometimes fiction hits a dry spot, or the mood shifts, or I tire of the drama. I long for something tethered more closely to reality. The non-fiction, more often than not, serves to bring me down to earth.

I look for books in which the author says what I am thinking or feeling in a much more eloquent way than I can. But, the best books of all are the ones that change my mind or make me consider more deeply. In such books, I underline passages. I write in the margins. These are always enjoyable to come back to. I smile whenever I find such scribbles or even inscriptions to and from strangers in the inner cover or on the title pages of used books. It makes me wonder about these people. Did we have the same interests, curiosities? What were their lives like? Whatever became of them?

In the early 1900’s Harvard President Charles W. Eliot remarked in a series of speeches that a three-foot shelf would be sufficient to hold enough books to provide anyone with a liberal education. He was soon overwhelmed with requests for the list of book titles that would fill the three-foot shelf. After many attempts at the list, Eliot decided that the shelf would need to be no less than five feet – but he failed to produce a complete list of books with which to fill it. Later, at the behest of the publishers of  Collier’s weekly, Dr. Eliot finally selected the books which came to be known as “The Harvard Classics” or the “Five-Foot Shelf of Books”.

My own shelf of books is slightly smaller in its dimensions than Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf. But, my four-foot shelf holds a different set of “classics”. A set of my own choosing. These are filled with the thoughts, subjects, atmosphere, and lives that make up my own unique reading experience. In a sense they are the collective thoughts of others, which when stirred together, produce something that somehow explains the way in which I see the world.

Inevitably, pieces of the worldview accumulated through one’s own personal library will filter into someone else’s vision. One day this collection of wisdom masquerading as a burden will disappear piece by piece like some literary diaspora. From the physical standpoint, some of these books won’t survive time’s ravages for very long. The fortunate titles will make their way into public or private libraries, thrift stores, used bookstores, or just maybe they’ll be handed down. We often hear that the physical printed page is on its way out. But, I hope not. Perhaps some wise soul will one day come across a random copy from my shelves. Perhaps they will see my underlined passages, my comments in the margins, and the inscriptions printed on the inside cover or title pages. Perhaps, seeing this, they’ll smile, and wonder.