A Personal Library
Harris & Ewing: Raccoon, c. 1913
by Joe Linker
How did the plumber’s son, whose father never read a book in his life, come to have about 3,000 books in his collection? I’m not a hoarder. A book must have some sort of meaning for me, an affinity established, which usually can only come from reading the book, before I keep it. Though of course there’s the stack I have not read. Then again there’s the stack read and loaned out and never returned. And a few, held since high school days, open so crisp and dry the pages break. And most of the books are paperback. And the collection taken as a whole is probably not worth much. Though I do have a few books that might be worth something to collectors of that bent. A first edition of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, for example, which a lady once offered $100 for at a garage sale back in the early 80’s. I said no, deciding to keep it. That $100 would have been spent on pizza and beer long ago, but I still have the book, somewhere.
With a bit of extra time on my hands these days, those close to me increasingly independent, and the pandemic still on (and off but on again), and with the easy availability and use of the Libib application, which I mentioned yesterday, I’ve decided to catalog the books, which are spread throughout the house in every room on shelves and bookcases and tables. The 3,000 is pretty much a guestimate, arrived at by counting the books on a couple of average looking shelves, measuring the length of those shelves, and then measuring the total length of shelves. Something like that.
Anyway, today I’ve added but one book to my Libib, spending most of my time reading through it rather than simply cataloging it and going on to the next book, and then distracted by writing up this post.
Here is the catalog info. for that book as I manually input into Libib:
Poetry
Book
Paroles
Jacques Prevert
1958 71 pages (City Lights Books, San Francisco)
Added
2022-04-21
Copies: 1
Description
First published 1946, copyright by Les Editions du Point du Jour, Paris, 1947. First published in this edition: July 1958, by arrangement with the Librarie Gallimard. My copy is sixth printing February 1968. Number Nine in The Pocket Poets Series published by City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, California, U.S.A. 94133. Translated with Intro. Note by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (San Francisco, 1964). From the Intro: “I first came upon the poetry of Jacques Prevert written on a paper tablecloth in St. Brieuc in 1944” (3).
Copies 1
No status.
Libib has no category or input for how a plumber’s son came to possess the book. So that I will answer here, maybe tomorrow. I think for now I might enter another book, but first, for those who’ve read this far:
From the Prevert poem titled “Inventory,” page 54.
One stone
two houses
three ruins
four grave-diggers
one garden
some flowers
one raccoon
a dozen oysters a lemon a loaf of bread
a ray of sunlight
one groundswell
six musicians
one door with doormat
one Mister decorated with the Legion of Honor
one more raccoon…
About the Author
Joe Linker blogs at The Coming of the Toads.
Publication Rights
Republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. This post is adapted from end tatters (Jan 2020).
Images
Post image is also captioned Harris & Ewing: Raccoon, c. 1913. Both photographs are from the Library of Congress and have no known restrictions on use.
