Archive for 2012

Literary Mileage
Book Love

Monday, February 13th, 2012

I belong to the Washington chapter of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA), an organization of women who spend their lives with books—as librarians, authors and writers, editors, publishers, and passionate readers. In a recent interview for WNBA’s national newsletter, Bookwoman, our President, Emily Sachs, described her first book love experience: “I would go to work with my mom on Saturdays. She worked at a pharmacy from 9-3:00 and there was a library branch nearby. My mom would walk me to the library and leave me there to read anything and everything I wanted—and I did! She’d come find me on her lunch break and we would eat sandwiches on a bench outside. Then, she would go back to work and I would go back to reading. It was truly a magical place, one in which I could get lost in books and stories and the world of the imagination.”
Emily’s memory triggered my own first book love experience–having the Bookmobile come to my neighborhood in the summers. We could pick out a maximum of 6 books to read. What angst to decide which 6! I would devour those and be waiting on the curb two weeks later to pick out another 6. 

The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley, England

 

Warm thanks to these wonderful book women who have shared the beginnings of their lifelong affair with books:
Claire Emory: Oh gosh, the Bookmobile! It came to the intersection of Riggs Road and East-West Highway….I remember a picture book called “The Princess and the Strawberry.” I think I was four. I still have the book packed away somewhere. My mother wrote in it,  “First book Claire picked out herself” and the date. I had a tiny bookcase in my bedroom and was so very proud of my “library.” I saved up my allowance to buy the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, the Penguin paperback biographies of Florence Nightingale and Helen Keller.
Janet Hulstrand: I remember from the summer when I was about 9 years old my Mom telling me (after I had read through a pile of books in just a few days). “Okay. We’re going to the library again. But this time you have to get enough books to last you for a whole week.” Fortunately, at that time, at our local library, there were no check-out limits!  
Patricia Leslie: Do you remember those “silhouette” books? When I was about 7, someone gave me a book about Lucretia Mott, one of our women’s rights foremothers. I never forgot that book and I know it influenced my being a women’s rights advocate. 

Dove Cottage, home of William Wordsworth, in Grasmere, England

Leslie Pietrzyk: The Enid Byton section in the children’s room and the stiff blue circular seats built around a pole (so exotic to have a chair that went all the way around!) and those early days of poking around in the Adult Section, which seemed so dark and crowded, compared to the children’s area, but so full of promise and vague danger. Also, reading “Mad Magazine” and feeling so subversive!
Mary Quattlebaum: Every two weeks, my mom would drive me and my six siblings from our country home to the nearest library about 30 miles away. We had to put all our library books in my mother’s huge wicker clothes basket. Two of us would then grasp the basket handles and wrestle it up the stairs to the library’s return desk. Years later, my mother learned that the librarians referred to her as the “basket lady.” Thanks to my mom, the basket lady, for making this effort and to my dad for reading all those books aloud to us.
I’d love to hear about your first book love! 

 

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