A Biography of the Bookcase on my Side of the Bed

By David Macpherson

Bookcases lie in wait.

 

They are teeming with books. Some of them you have read. Some of them you were given as gifts. Other books were bought with enthusiasm and then ignored. Forgotten.

 

Bookcases tell the story of a the owner of the books. They tell you what his interests are and where he buys his books. What stores does he loiter in? 

 

This is a memoir of five years of buying and reading and not reading books. David goes through each of the books in the bookcase and tells the story of why he has the book and why he hasn't read it.

 

It tells you the life of someone who loves and believes in books. You should get this and put this on your bookshelf. Go ahead and complete the circle.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Macpherson
• Release date: Apr 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224696956

Book preview

A Biography of the Bookcase on my Side of the Bed

The Bookcase

My wife got it for me to get the books off the floor. They had been gathering there with the plan to read them next, or the next after that. Whenever. The books were meant to be read. Now they were in piles by the window sill like ancient burial mounds.

She told me this would be good for all the recent books.

It was a thoughtful gift. It certainly was going to make it easier to walk on that side of the room.

It had three shelves. It was three quarters full as soon as I got it and started removing the books from the floor and putting it there.

This was in 2020, in the early months of the Pandemic season.

I kept on buying books like I always did.

I was not reading as quickly. Even though I was home a lot more, I was watching things on the internet instead of my first love, reading.

And even with the awareness of that, I kept on buying books.

After a year or two, I could not put put anymore books on the shelves. They were tight and teaming.

The books started piling up on the floor. Like before. As if the floof by the window missed the weight of all those unread books. The floor was lonely.

I still intend to read them. Most of the books there have not been even attempted. But that’s good. That’s a good reason for a bookshelf. In a Harlan Ellison story, someone asks an old man if he read all those books he has on his bookshelf. The reply was, Hell no. Why would I want a bookshelf with books I already read?

With that in mind, I have made this bookshelf very happy. Ready to take up its responsibility. These are the books you want to read. These are the books you got from various bookshops or loved ones who gave them to you because they were sure you would dig it. These are those books. The perfect bookshelf. For me.

It is filled with crime novels and treatises on fairy tales and graphic novels and comics. There are a lot of comics.

This is the history of my interests. This is a history of buying and reading books during and after the pandemic. This is everything you need to know about me. The first thing you can realize about me is that I don’t read as much as I used to.

The Top Shelf

From Left to Right

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The Hungry Tiger of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson. This is a Del Rey paperback that I bought for 3 dollars from a West Hartford bookstore called Brick Walk Books. This was a cramped and very good used bookstore that had original art in between the shelves. I was there once and he and another guy were talking about an art exhibit that the store owner helped put together for the New Britain Museum of American Art. This was kind of exciting for me. It had all my favorite things: books and art. I sought out this bookstore because it was written about in a memoir about book collecting called Used and Rare by Laurence and Nancy Goldstone. They wrote three books about collecting books in New England and I made it a thing to go to the stores they mentioned. This one figured highly in their books. I went there a few times and spoke to the owner. He said that for a while, he did not sell online and he regrets the years of selling he missed on. He also said that he keeps a brick and mortar store so that people can find him to sell him books. I bought this and the next two books around 2017 or so. Around 2018, I went back there and there was the sign that read, Closed for Renovations. I have seen that very sign on favorite book stores and restaurants before and that always meant, We are out of business but not ready to admit it to ourselves yet. The next time I was around there, the storefront was now an antique store.

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The Gnome King of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson. Another Del Rey book in great shape that I got from Brick Walk Books for three bucks. I didn’t read any of the Oz books until I was in my twenties. I missed the right years to discover them. I read a handful of the Baum books. I also got into the silent Oz movies that Baum directed himself. Ruth Plumly Thompson was the next Oz writer after Baum died. She was a writer for the children’s section of a Philadelphia newspaper and was excellent. I had a book of her newspaper stories and I thought it was great. So I was very excited to find these. Getting her books were never as easy as finding the original fourteen books that Baum wrote. These are very nice paperbacks with lovely painted covers by Michael Herring (I never heard of him, but the covers are cool.) Because there is one more of these Oz books on the shelf, I will stop here and move on to the next book.

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Grampa in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson.  Del Rey. Three bucks from the same place. Great shape. I never read these books. They have stayed for almost a decade in the bedroom because I have always intended to read them. I started one of them but it never struck me. I always figured I would get back to them. Though I love the American style fairy tales of the Oz books, they can be a little tough to read for me. They are too episodic for me to dive into them one after the other. Dorothy and Ozma and the gang go to one new territory with weird creatures and have a small adventure and then on to the next territory and the next until the story is done. It seemed that the Thompson ones had the same structure and I have not really found myself invested in getting back to them. They are staying on the shelf, because