{"id":593,"date":"2015-03-05T17:15:21","date_gmt":"2015-03-05T23:15:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/?p=593"},"modified":"2015-03-05T17:15:21","modified_gmt":"2015-03-05T23:15:21","slug":"autobiography-of-a-bibliophile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/autobiography-of-a-bibliophile\/","title":{"rendered":"Autobiography of a Bibliophile"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Autobiography<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s my grandmother\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n

Every time I visited her during my childhood, she\u2019d give me books. Not just two or three books, but a boxful<\/em> of books. She was a fourth-grade schoolteacher, and when she ordered from the book club for her class, she stocked up for me as well.<\/p>\n

Actually, my love of reading goes back even further than that, to the hours upon hours my patient parents spent reading aloud to me. Johnny Gruelle\u2019s Raggedy Ann books stand out in my memory\u2014and they\u2019re still on my bookshelf.<\/p>\n

But my passion for collecting books is my grandmother\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n

It started innocently enough with the paperback editions of children\u2019s classics that she provided: Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/em>, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm<\/em>, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew<\/em>, A Little Princess<\/em>, The Secret Garden<\/em>, my well-worn copy of Little Women<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Pretty soon, random paperbacks weren\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n

My obliging parents supplied me with a set of hardcover Little House books in dust jackets (the price on my beloved copy of Little House on the Prairie<\/em> is only $4.95) and the sixteen-volume set of The World Treasury of Children\u2019s Classics in matching royal-blue bindings.<\/p>\n

In my middle- and high-school years I rambled across Prince Edward Island with Anne Shirley, journeyed to Narnia with the Pevensies, explored Middle-Earth with Bilbo and Frodo, and wandered the moors with Jane Eyre. I shared the secret room with the Jews in Corrie ten Boom\u2019s The Hiding Place<\/em> and learned to trust God\u2019s sovereignty with Joni Eareckson.<\/p>\n

In college I fell in love\u2014with the fiction of Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jane Austen, and fellow Mississippian Eudora Welty. I also began to build my own library of books on theology and Christian living: Francis and Edith Schaeffer, Jerry Bridges, C. S. Lewis, A. W. Pink, J. I. Packer, Sinclair Ferguson, R. C. Sproul, Elisabeth Elliot.<\/p>\n

In graduate school I came under the tutelage of Matthew J. Bruccoli\u2014professor, author, publisher, and book-collector extraordinaire\u2014who initiated me into the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald and instructed me in the fine arts of editing, bibliography, and serious book collecting: first editions, limited editions, states and issues, dust jacket variants, books with blurbs or forewords or introductions by my favorite authors, magazines with their stories or articles. The Eudora Welty collection I built in those years won a $300 prize from the university\u2019s library society.<\/p>\n

I was such a faithful patron of the University of South Carolina bookstore\u2019s special-order desk (the titles I wanted were seldom in stock) that the clerks gave me a copy of Goodnight Moon<\/em>\u2014 complete with stuffed bunny in blue-striped pj\u2019s\u2014when I gave birth to my first child just before finishing my master\u2019s degree.<\/p>\n

The transition from the rarefied halls of academia to the realities of motherhood at home was comparatively easy. Educating my sons has led me into new realms of reading and book collecting. My shelves of home education resources feature the works of Charlotte Mason, Karen Andreola, Catherine Levison, Ruth Beechick, Raymond and Dorothy Moore, Clay and Sally Clarkson, Susan and Michael Card, Harvey and Laurie Bluedorn, and Susan Schaeffer Macaulay.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had the delight of encountering authors I\u2019d somehow missed like Eric Carle and the d\u2019Aulaires, revisiting childhood favorites (I wept with my children at the death of Charlotte the spider and rejoiced anew at the resurrection of Aslan), and discovering a whole new side of the Little House books. In my girlhood I had focused on the dolls, the nine-patch quilts, and the romance between Laura and Almanzo; reading the books with my boys reminded me that they\u2019re also full of Indians, wild animals, and adventure.<\/p>\n

Then there are all those wonderful children\u2019s series to collect: Landmarks, Childhood of Famous Americans, All About books, American Heritage Junior Library, Horizon Caravel, World Explorers.<\/p>\n

Of course, if you\u2019re serious about building a home library for your family, you need plenty of books about selecting books: Honey for a Child\u2019s Heart<\/em>, Books Children Love<\/em>, How to Grow a Young Reader<\/em>, A Landscape with Dragons<\/em>, Who Should We Then Read?<\/em>, All Through the Ages<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, there is a generous genre of books about reading, publishing, and bibliophilia. I found kindred spirits in Helene Hanff\u2019s 84, Charing Cross Road<\/em> and Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern\u2019s Old Books, Rare Friends<\/em>, which occupy the same shelf (well, actually two shelves) in my office as The Open Door: When Writers First Learned to Read<\/em>; The Delights of Reading<\/em>; A Passion for Books<\/em>; The Book on the Bookshelf<\/em>; Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of American Book Publishing<\/em>; At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries<\/em>; and A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Naturally, I require a place to shelve all these treasures: 17 bookcases in my home office, 8 in the living room, 5 in the dining room, 2 in the kitchen, 3 in the schoolroom, 3 in the hall, 9 in the bedrooms. Not to mention all those boxes of recent library-sale acquisitions that I haven\u2019t even shelved yet….<\/p>\n

And it appears the obsession is hereditary\u2014or at least contagious. My four boys all show symptoms of bibliophilia, ranging from early read-aloud addiction to full-blown collecting mania.<\/p>\n

Three-year-old Thomas is seldom still for more than a few seconds, but just read aloud to him and he\u2019ll snuggle in your lap for hours. Pooh is his current favorite.<\/p>\n

Seven-year-old Perry is the most ardent advocate of our family read-aloud times: \u201cPlease, Mom, just one more chapter of Carry On, Mr. Bowditch<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

Nine-year-old Andrew (whose preferred location for burying his nose in a book is on top of the monkey bars) recently moved some of his favorite science books to a special shelf in his own room \u201cbecause I love them so much.\u201d When I handed him The Boy Scientist<\/em> and The Romance of Chemistry<\/em> to add to his collection, his eyes got big as saucers and his jaw dropped in delighted amazement.<\/p>\n

Forrest, almost twelve, saves his allowance for hardcover Redwall books, treasures two shelves of books by and about J. R. R. Tolkien (and regales visitors with obscure details of the history of Middle-Earth), and is building an impressive library of books about explorers\u2014the topic which ignited his enthusiasm for the study of history. On his eleventh birthday he welcomed an addition to that collection with a comment that would warm any bibliophilic mother\u2019s heart: \u201cOh, Mom, I needed another book about Sir Francis Drake\u2014I only had one!\u201d<\/p>\n

If my children\u2019s addiction is hereditary, it\u2019s all my grandmother\u2019s fault. But somehow, I don\u2019t think she minds.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This article first appeared in Confessions of a Bookjunkie<\/em> (Bookjunkie Press, 2004) and was reprinted in the May\/June 2004 issue of Homeschooling Today<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  It\u2019s my grandmother\u2019s fault. Every time I visited her during my childhood, she\u2019d give me books. Not just two or three books, but a boxful of books. She was a fourth-grade schoolteacher, and when she ordered from the book club for her class, she stocked up for me as well. Actually, my love of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[16,17,19,18,15],"class_list":["post-593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-bibliophile","tag-book-lover","tag-books","tag-reading","tag-world-book-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}