Unpacking My Library

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up…

The miniature is only small by comparison. Gulliver explains: “Nature hath adapted the Eyes of the Lilliputians to all Objects proper for…

I am not the first reader to love this book for its pictures. It falls open to a pair of bucolic woodcuts of spring and summer.

Let us bother the librarian once again . Let us ask him to reach down, dust, and hand over to us that little brown book over there, the…

There’s an attention to season in this cookbook that is absent even from a California farmers’ market. To make a salad, Mrs. Cornelius…

I had a song stuck in my head this morning. Thankfully I don’t remember it now. Songs like this come unbidden, related to words or phrases…

The Massachusetts Register is the most used book in my library. Its corners are rounded with wear and it thumbs easily, like a deck of…

Dictionary, dik’shun-a-re. s. a book containing the words of any language, a vocabulary.

Books bring people together. It’s easy to picture a solitary reader, wrapped around an open book, the outside world gone quiet. But, books…

Finding this book among the many felt like discovering a rare gem in a box of costume jewelry, although, truthfully, the analogy is…

Preserved inside Albert Eames’ copy of the Standard Fifth Reader is a folded handbill. It advertises “plain and fancy dancing,” taught by…

Why do we need to name? What do we gain by calling a bird a vireo? Or an early printed book an incunabulum? Why does anyone need to know…

Books talk to us. The voices we hear will vary. Hearing your own inner voice is like catching your shadow by the hand. Sometimes hear the…

Since the rise of silent reading in the tenth century, books have promised private experiences. We may later convene with other readers who…

This volume of Cicero’s Orations, including annotations in English and the original speeches in Latin, has me thinking about voice…

It’s becoming clear to me now that what I’m doing here is parsing. I’m parsing books — and also time. Like Zeno’s paradox: the more you…

The most prolific collector of American textbooks, John A. Nietz, asserted in 1961 that: “every one who can read has studied some…

While a bible’s endpapers were often fertile ground for a family tree, school books of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries…