Bookcases

I need to make some new book cases. I have way too many books and way too many of them are in boxes. I don't know the point of having all of my books out. It seems comforting. I'll never run out of things to read, and that is a good feeling, but I'll never be able to read them all. Well, not if they are in boxes, and that isn't such a good feeling.

When we moved last year my little lamb said she needed a little more room on the book shelves to put out a few things. That amounted to three book cases worth, and a fourth moved upstairs to the spare bedroom because it looked better up there. It does, but where do I put my books? My office is in the basement now, and there are stacks of boxes begging me to give them bookcases.

I'm almost too embarrassed to pull my 13th edition Britannica out and look things up. The information would all be out-dated, but outdated in the most interesting way. Henry Ford wrote the section on automation, Madam Curie wrote the section on radioactive material. Sigmund Freud on Psychiatry, Albert Einstein on relativity, and the list is a who's who of the day. It is sitting in a box.

So is my 30 volume dictionary printed on rag paper before the Civil War. It is handy when reading my even older copies of Dickens because some of the words used then aren't even in modern dictionaries. Time would fail me to speak of my other books that I consider jewels stored in cardboard boxes. My biography of Bonaparte in four volumes, my Paradise Lost with the Dore engravings, old enough that no date was printed in the book—not yet a convention.

Books I never heard of, bought at rummage sales and old book stores.

Not everything is old. Some of it is pretty darned new. Some is new copies of old stuff. But the new sits by the old. Waiting for a resurrection. A place on a shelf. A proof of its worth. Fulfillment of its function and purpose for existence.

I have a plan.

I have the vehicle tomorrow. And, the checkbook. And, a few hours in which I need not account for myself. And, I will be driving right past the home center. I have already drawn up the plans, measured the space, and will have a little extra time.

Books, rejoice! For your resurrection draws near! I will prepare a place for you! I will bring you to be where I am also, and you will be my own particular treasures. Just be patient.