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| Mural of Old Butte Library, photograph from The Montana Standard |
Welcome to the 2014 edition of the Summer Library Series. Every Friday for much of the summer, writers will share reflections on their lives in the library.
To kick off the season, Donald Anderson shares the important stories that came from his father, from near his front door, and from the shelves of the Butte, Montana Public Library.
Enjoy!
Two Bookcases
by Donald Anderson
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| From Butte Digital Image Collection |
There were two bookcases in my childhood home.
Waist-high and constructed of pine (that wood of the novice carpenter), they
flanked the front door to the house that had jammed and that no one used. Except
for a partial set of Wonder Books, there were no children’s resources in
those varnished shelves, dedicated as they were to volumes of Reader’s
Digest Condensed Books and religious tomes like Ben-Hur and The
Robe, and a blue-covered, thumb-indexed Complete Works of William
Shakespeare.
My earliest sense of children’s stories
came from my father, who could repeat from memory long sections of “Hiawatha”
or “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” and the full texts of poems like “The
Village Blacksmith” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” He invented bedtime tales,
serials he recounted about Indian boys, eagles, Eskimos, bears, gold fields,
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. There were big-headed dogs in most of his
stories. And it was my father who encouraged me to read, as he had, Edgar Rice
Burroughs and Jack London, James Oliver Curwood, Booth Tarkington, and the
entirety of the Bomba
the Jungle Boy series, all titles from
the children’s shelves at the Butte Public Library. It was my story-telling father
who had taken me there to sign up for the paper card that gave me access on my
own (though the librarian, hardly about to fork over the card, kept it filed in
a box on her desk).
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| Photo by Ed Uthman, used under CC license |
More than 40 years ago now, when I was
readying for college, four books in particular (that I checked out with my now
walleted and laminated card) introduced me to a world of literature beyond
which I’d yet ventured. I recall these four books (each requiring a maximum
two-week completion) with clarity, a sense of privilege or charter, and
affection. Catcher in the Rye startled me with its wise guy voice
and its indictment of adult hypocrisy. Then as if the allure of the Big Apple
in Catcher hadn't been enough, Ayn Rand’s The
Fountainhead made me want to flee Butte, Montana, to build big
city skyscrapers and to sleep with tall, lean women who wore black clothes,
smoked, and maybe spoke French. But if I’d wanted to hang with Holden Caulfield
and be named Howard Roark, I knew for fairly certain that I did not want to be
Nick Adams or Jake Barnes.
When I came upon In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises, my life as a reader was recalibrated. Nick and Jake seemed real to me, not imagined in the way Caulfield and Roark had felt to be. Nick and Jake weren’t clever or powerful. The lives they’d lived and were living were the serious and direct consequence of the world in which they existed—the world I was beginning to know: a world of flawed fathers, vulnerable health and governments, failed loves, and random danger. Though it would take some time to coalesce, In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises made me want to be a writer. And then: John Cheever, Alice Munro, V.S. Pritchett, William Trevor, Gina Berriault, Andre Dubus, Frederick Busch, Ann Beattie, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford. . . .
When I came upon In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises, my life as a reader was recalibrated. Nick and Jake seemed real to me, not imagined in the way Caulfield and Roark had felt to be. Nick and Jake weren’t clever or powerful. The lives they’d lived and were living were the serious and direct consequence of the world in which they existed—the world I was beginning to know: a world of flawed fathers, vulnerable health and governments, failed loves, and random danger. Though it would take some time to coalesce, In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises made me want to be a writer. And then: John Cheever, Alice Munro, V.S. Pritchett, William Trevor, Gina Berriault, Andre Dubus, Frederick Busch, Ann Beattie, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford. . . .
We are (I believe deep in my bones)
where we’ve been and what we’ve read, and these days I carry a library literally
in my hands: my Color NOOK. When I add a book to my NOOK, I feel as though I’m
checking it out, but without the need to return in 14 days. I can walk about, a
bookcase of books in one hand indefinitely! I suppose I should report that in
my adult homes I have always installed floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with physical
books, many of which purchased at library sales.
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