Books Have Always Been My Companions
Libraries and bookstores are huge treasure chests where I can forget time and space. Reading is like breathing air. A necessity.
I always admired people who owned so many books that their bookshelves spread from one corner of a room to another.
Today I collect children’s books and the attic is my Shangri-La, my happy land. You can find me kneeling in front of the shelves, snuggled up on a huge pillow, reading. The shelves spread around all four walls and I built them myself.
Selling books online started as an opportunity to declutter unwanted copies of stuff I’d never read.
Then word spread around and I started getting donations. At first just a few copies but today the book donations are plentiful. Mostly because someone moves to a nursing home or people have passed away. Heirs are happy that the books won’t be thrown away. Sometimes I know the former owner, sometimes I don’t.
Every donation is different. The books reflect their owners. I get to know them when I sort the donations. Lately I was given the book collection of my former school principal. Apparently she was interested in French literature and paintings. In a pile of brochures I found a playbill of a play she once took the whole school and all the memories came back. The book collection of a neighbor reflected that he was a teacher for Greek, Latin and French. His son loved Alaska and he owned the most stunning coffee table books. Both had a fatal accident while doing rock climbing.
The latest donation is from a relative who I have never met in person. She was a lawyer and passed away at the age of 98. The moving boxes are full of antiquarian books, some from the 19th century, all decorated with her book plate, a coat of arms. Apparently she loved Japanese art, Art Deco and German classics in wonderful, almost pristine volumes.
Opening such moving boxes and sorting the books, I always get lost in them. I can’t help thinking: “What’s the legacy of this person?” All the knowledge, all the life experience, is it gone forever?
My 98 year old relative set up a foundation that gives scholarships to law students, the school principal and my neighbor were teachers who tutored thousands of students. That’s a nice legacy, don’t you think?
But what about the books, you may ask. What happens to them?
Well, I sell them. I sell them to journalists, students, museums, libraries and also to people who just want to read them. I sell them to people all over the world, from Europe, Israel, Russia, Australia and the United States and sometimes I have the nicest conversation. It makes me happy.
With the proceeds I fund the Rainbow Square’s projects. Also a nice legacy, don’t you think?
images from top to bottom and left to right:
Sabine