I am at the checkout counter at Twice Told Tales used bookshop in Brunswick. In my hand is the second volume of Edmund Morris’ three-volume set about the life of Theodore Roosevelt. The volunteer cashier, an older woman, hair turned white from wisdom, takes my book and requests $5. I hand over the money, and as she hands me back my book, she asks me if I have read the third volume.
“I haven’t yet,” I say. “Let me guess — he dies in the end.” I wait for her to chuckle, but she has already moved on to talking about Roosevelt’s Amazon safari.
“Have you read about his trip? There’s a book about it that I came across years ago. Now that was a good book.”
“No,” I say, “but I will, and if I did not like buying used books so much, I’d probably buy it on Amazon — you know, for the irony.”
I wait for her to chuckle, but she is already looking past me to the next customer. It is a signal that tells me to move on.
***
It took four or five trips to Twice Told Tales, all about a couple months apart, for the second T. Roosevelt volume to appear. Whenever I was in town and near the shop, I would wander in, make my way to the back of the store and scan the R section. For days and days and days, powerful, scheming forces worked to keep the second volume off the shelf. And then, like the tide that unfailingly fills and empties Long Reach, those same essences banded together to get the book into the bookshop by my next visit.
When I saw the second volume, I felt a feeling of joy — yes, joy. And I remembered that feeling when I got home and looked at my own books that I have kept but not read for many years. As my fingers trailed over Camus’ “The Stranger,” Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and many other titles, I came to realize something. My books have not been experiencing a shelf life but a shelf death. It was time for them to move to another shelf. It was time for them to come to life again and bring their challenges, their humor, their perspectives to someone else.
So I packed many of them up and brought three boxes to Twice Told Tales. Now, I didn’t donate every book I own, because I have found I need to go through a grieving process to say goodbye to a friend I’ve hung out with for many years, some for more than 30. But I have certainly culled my library and have expanded my search to drawers and cabinets in my house where odds and ends, like a small hammer, also are experiencing a shelf death. They only need a little help from me — a trip to a donation bin or a thrift store — to find a renewed purpose and a renewed vitality.
***
I am in Twice Told Tales a few weeks after I gave them my books. I see some of them on their new shelves. Others are missing. They may still be in the back room waiting to make their grand appearance or, more likely, they are out in the world again. I’d like to think one of my books is in someone’s hands right now, being read and loved at this very moment, and maybe even, because it is a long process, slowly, ever so slowly, turning the reader’s hair white.
