I want to start with the shelves themselves — tall, dark, flanking the fireplace. My sister would inherit those shelves when our parents sold the house, but I don’t think the shelves followed her to her new home, purchased three years ago. They were falling apart by then, which seems unfathomable to me. I thought those shelves would stand forever, like Memorial Stadium, which . . . was leveled a few years back.
And then there were the objects — a porcelain duck (why? I don’t know, but I own it now), wooden and lacquered boxes with playing cards. But, mostly, there were books. Winston Churchill, Will and Ariel Durant. A set of hardbacked American Heritage magazines, including one that had a very comprehensive article on L. Frank Baum and Oz and its fanatics. James Jones. World Book Encyclopedia, where I doted on the color illustrations of dogs, cats, flowers, and the multi-layered anatomical charts.
There would have been so much more, for those two six-foot, possibly taller cases were very full. Were there Modern Library books? Another set of classics? Did my mother’s all-in-one Shakespeare volume reside there? It must have, but I don’t see it on the shelf in my memory. I see . . . Churchill, Durant, Jones. And, I think, Damon Runyon. I can see that book’s spine as I write this, brick-colored, with stripes and a blue oval. The Marx Brothers at the Movies. Will Cuppy? I think so, for I remember my father giving it to me when I discovered Richard Armour. Valley of the Dolls? Why, that was in the linen closet, where it belonged, hidden among the towels.
Mainly, what I remember is the sheer volume of volumes. My childhood home had an unusually large pantry, a narrow corridor that ran between living room and kitchen. But more space was dedicated to books than anything else. Sometimes I roamed that pantry, bitterly disappointed by the choices there. But I don’t recall ever feeling that way about the bookshelves.
We had one of those 1960s basements: wood paneling, red and white tile floor, with the concrete beams in the middle holding up the house. And stacked against one wall were three tall bookshelves. That’s where I first dug out “Love Story” and “Valley of the Dolls” and “In Cold Blood” (I was too young to read them but read them anyway). The World Book encyclopedia was there, too, and I think got sold in a tag sale somewhere along the line. I did inherit “Tom Jones,” and was going to finally finish it after college but the bookmark is still halfway through it.
We had bookshelves by the fireplace as well. The books were a little less highbrow..mostly spy thrillers my dad was partial to, and biographies for my mother. “In Cold Blood” was up there, “The ZinZin Road”, many, many Reader’s Digest condensed books, “The Godfather”, too. Of course, there were the hidden books in my parents closet, which I dutifully found and read avidly, not actually understanding much. “The Joy of Sex”, of course, “Valley of the Dolls”, “Portnoy’s Complaint”. In this day of v-chips, it seems strange now that my parents didn’t monitor what I was reading and at what age. I picked up “In Cold Blood” when I was 10 and was thoroughly traumatized by it. What’s really strange is that it wasn’t the murder of the family that most disturbed me. It was the idea that one of the murderers would go out of his way to hit a dog or a cat with the car that scarred me. I had no idea that people could be so cruel. Truly a loss of innocence.
But thank god both of my parents were big readers. I still try to get my dad to elevate his reading habits a bit, but they taught me to love the written word.
We moved around so much that I don’t remember any one set of bookshelves, just two books that moved from house to house with us.
What books made the cut?
An abridged collection of Shakespeare that no one read. Not ever.
The Bible. No one read that either.
My parents had bookshelves from the cheap chipboard flat-pack furniture days of the early 80s. They still do.
Such was the era I grew up in.
I remember two ugly, dark wood bookcases but can hardly recall the contents, except for a bible and an all-in-one Shakespeare, used more for references than reading, and a Webster’s. Those shelves also held the games for my sister and me….chinese checkers, regular checkers, bingo, monopoly, pick up sticks…whatever was around in those days.
However, there was a constant stack of library books for the adults as well as the children and lots of magazines: Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Readers Digest, Time, Look, but for some reason, never Life. It was those magazines that helped hook me on reading. They started off reading us the cartoons in the backs and then the Readers Digest jokes and then encouraging us to read them ourselves, which had us paging through the zines and actually stopping at articles that we thought we comprehended. We felt so grown up.
The bookcases that impressed me were the two full walls of built-in white shelves at my Aunt Betty’s, with a baby grand piano in the nook. I used to love going to visit her for a week in the summer because I felt as if I had my own private library, even when I was too young for some of what I read. To this day I must have a shelf or two or three of new books, ready for picking out what suits my mood of the moment.
Just remembered what else was on those brown bookcases. As a child, whenever I was given money, I spent it at the bookstore. Bobbsey Twins, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Nancy Drew, Little Women and all the Alcott books, for starters. June
My parents married young and were poor as churchmice; Dad built their first bookcase out of 1/2″ plywood, eight rectangular boxes that doubled as moving cases when the Navy sent us from California to Norfolk. The assembled bookcase stood about six feet high, maybe four feet wide. The boxes weren’t nailed together until we moved to Fairfax, at which point Dad painted the whole thing green; later, it was blue, and still later, a battleship gray. I think it’s still in their garage.
By the time we moved back to Virginia Beach, my parents had bought real furniture, including real bookcases made of cherry wood. The contents: that omnibus Shakespeare volume, Churchill’s histories, the complete works of Galsworthy (which Mom claims to have read), Bruce Catton’s multi-volume history of the Civil War, several years’ worth of Naval Academy Proceedings, and a bunch of Modern Library editions, including a combined volume of SHE and KING SOLOMON’S MINES, which I remember trying to read as a very small child.
“The Joy of Sex” lived on the bottom shelf of Mom’s nightstand…
This brings back the Bouchercon revelation (new to me) that Dennis Lehane grew up in a house where the only book was the Bible.
Meanwhile, on the “Joy of Sex” thread — I heartily recommend Meg Wolitzer’s “The Position,” a book about four children who discover that their parents wrote and modeled for a very “Joy” like book. Wolitzer has been a smart, reliable novelist for years, but with “The Wife” and “The Position,” she scaled new heights. I love both, but “The Wife” is a tight, angry, lucid little book.
And as for parents who didn’t keep a close eye on things — my sister somehow convinced them to drop us off at Bonnie and Clyde when she was 11 and I was 8. I still wonder how she did that.
Our bookshelves migrated from place to place within the house depending on Mom’s decorating whims (most of which involved moving the furniture around, not buying new stuff). The one constant was that every bedroom had at least one bookshelf, and when Dad built the big storage shelves and cabinets in the garage, one big set of shelves and one huge cabinet were devoted to Mom’s paperbacks (and a few of Dad’s suspense/spy novels).
I can still smell the mingled scents of plywood, paper, and ink, liberated by hot California summer afternoons, as I dug through that cabinet looking for treasures old and new. Victoria Holt gothics, Louis L’Amour westerns, Robert Ludlum spy thrillers, Steven King, the Modesty Blaise series, and lots of sci fi/fantasy. I read a bunch of stuff when I was too young for it (Rosemary’s Baby gave me nightmares for days), but the only book Mom ever told me not to read was The Exorcist, because she knew it would freak me out.
I miss that cabinet!
My parents bookcases were built-in cabinets, only two while I was growing up, but they added on to the house the year I got married and the addition included 2 sets of really nice shelves. We mostly had reference books: a set of World Book for my sister and I , upgraded to Britannica for my brother, who is 11 years younger. There was an unabridged dictionary, Bartlett’s, a current almanac, and an atlas. The only fiction I remember was Barefoot boy with cheek by Max Shulman which had been my father’s when he was young. Fiction came from libraries, and we went weekly. This combination of reference books and frequent visits to the library led to me growing up to be a librarian.
Now my grandmother’s bookcases were overstuffed with a combination of ficiton and non-fiction. I mainly remember Winston Churchill, but that was the name of my high school also. I inherited those bookcases. The stand-alone made by my uncle is filled with reference books. One of the pair is filled with books I’ve read but am keeping (including 3 Tess, and To the Power of Three, which was the best thing I brought home from ALA) The other has nonfiction that isn’t really relevant here.
My mom and Dad spit up when I was four so the bookshelves were in two places. My dad’s would have been the most interesting as my mom’s was geared for us kids. We had shelves filled with children’s books. One favorite was a poor girl named after the French word for match that I can’t think of spelling right now. My grandmother got us books with our names in the text which made reading fun. Then there was the encyclopedias, dictionaries and other reference stuff…
I remember my dad was always reading something. I think he liked historical fiction. He had one or more about Nazis. He also had some unmentionable magazines under his bed. It’s probably for the best that we didn’t live there except on weekends.
Two homemade, dark brown, wooden bookcases, each five shelves high were permanent fixtures on one wall in the ‘front room’ of our very small frame house. No family rooms per se in those days — with ours being more of a multipurpose living-dining-nursery-sewing-rumpus room for seven people. My Dad was the avid reader in the family; Mom, not so much.. though she had an interesting cookbook collection that I loved to browse.
My father was a true lover of history and had aspired to be a high school history teacher until WWII and then marriage and children, I suppose, derailed his college completion plans. He was particularly obsessed with _anything_ related to the US Civil War. The more obscure, the better. So in addition to Bruce Catton, he had had dozens of older ‘histories’, by authors I cannot recall, tucked around the house wherever he could make room for another shelf. He also had CW battlefield maps with troop movements, etc, that he’d put up with cello tape on the walls.. stuck right on the wallpaper.. (… made poor Mom crazy ) I’ve always been very fond of maps too after poring over those with him …
Fiction and non-fiction authors that I can remember picking up and trying to read (this was in the 1950s-early 60s) John Hersey, Daphne du Maurier, Somerset Maugham, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, Edna Ferber, Erich Maria Remarque, Wm. Shirer, Thor Heyerdahl adventures (loved those), et. al. I borrowed many of these to read, though some were way over the head of that young girl. Religious writers were there: Thomas Merton, Fulton Sheen, Song of Bernadette, The Nun’s Story, and Cardinal Spellman, iirc, in abundance. We had huge boxes stored in our unheated backroom of National Geographic magazines, some quite old, and these were my particular favorites to browse — and made me think I might be some kind of photographer one day — so I could travel to some of these marvelous, exotic, truly magical places. Africa. Wanted so badly to go to Africa… and I still do.
The biggest book we had was a huge, heavy old dictionary discarded by Roosevelt Univ. library (from the 1940s, I think) with a few pages missing here and there, which added to its dog-eared charm. And then there were the assorted encyclopedia volumes which Dad picked up at yard sales for a song. Not a complete set of any one kind, but various mismatched volumes. Still, they were fun to read.
We may have been the very last family in our neighborhood to have a tv set, so we probably read more books than most other families we knew. At the time, we children did not think this a good thing, but looking back I realize now that it was we who were the lucky ones. Can’t remember when I did not love being surrounded by books.
The book from my parents’ bookshelves that I remember most vividly is Desmond Morris’s “The Naked Ape.” I never attempted to read it; it was the cover art that caught my attention. It was a paperback that had a photograph of the front of a chimp on the front cover and a photograph of the back of a naked man on the back cover. Hence my fascination. I don’t think I ever tried to read the book — I just giggled at the naked picture.
My other strong book memory connected with my parents is of my dad’s quest to obtain a complete set of old editions of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. We were living in Edinburgh at the time and I trailed through a lot of second-hand bookshops with him. No doubt the seeds of my own book collecting habit were sown there. The dusty old bookshops crammed with ancient tomes seemed like magical places to me.