Books: The Initial Spark

There is nothing more powerful than the words we use as individuals and as a society . . . words to challenge, inform, motivate, subdue, intimidate, entertain, threaten, instruct, sell, change, or comfort. When our words are put on paper and bound between covers they become a fixed entity that, in a way, takes on a life of its own. Our thoughts become words and our words become books.

Until age thirteen I lived a very physical life: dance lessons, hiking in the woods near our home, and skating on a nearby pond. But I was set back with a prolonged illness at the start of high school, and it was then I began to discover the magic of books. The library in the small Ohio town where I lived with my parents was a pleasant summer’s walk away, holding ideas and stories that took me beyond the limitations of an insecure adolescence. I checked out as many books as I could carry the mile or so back home. I didn’t learn about other ideas, religions, governments, and centuries at my local school. School was the place I had to go to before I could go to the library. When I was able to work in the school library, well, that helped quite a bit.

I remember one afternoon when my father came to pick me up outside a secondhand book sale and was astonished to find me standing on the sidewalk with three large cardboard boxes full of books. My mother kindly made room in the hall closet for the complete set of twenty or so antique, embossed, oversize hardcover books on classical music and voice training. One treasured find was a book that opened to reveal fold-out newspaper articles written as if at the time of the Old Testament: “Moses Parts the Red Sea, Enemy Dies by the 1000s!” “ ‘I Respect My Father’s Judgment,’ Isaac States, as He Returns from Mountain Trip.” “ ‘I Never Looked Back,’ Lot Assured this Reporter.”

One of my clearest memories is the arrival of several boxes to the home of my high school English teacher who lived in the same apartment complex as my family. I don’t remember her name, but I remember her encouragement of my interest in books and art, and it was my good luck that she put me on the team publishing our school’s first literary magazine.

When the boxes of printed and bound magazines arrived, it was quite an occasion. I remember vividly how they smelled of ink and how the paper felt. That sense of delight hasn’t diminished for me: decades and hundreds of books on a wide variety of subjects later, I still feel happy anticipation cutting through the packing tape, and pulling out the first printed copy of a new book.