You don’t know me, but I know all your secrets.
I know what interests you and what bores you. I know what makes you angry and what makes you laugh. I know what you’re looking forward to and what you’d like to forget. I know what you dreamed of being when you grew up and if you landed close. I know what areas of yourself you think need improvement and what worries and illnesses are vexing you. I know your hobbies, whether or not you like animals, and where you lean politically. I even know what you find romantic.
As the person who oversees the used-book donations at the local library, I’m invited into your life and the lives of dozens of other people I will never meet. The books arrive packed inside things like bankers boxes, Trader Joe’s bags and old milk crates. For me and the dozen or so volunteers who price and sort the books in the library’s basement, each anonymous parcel is a treasure chest waiting to be opened. In an age in which I can no longer tell the difference between a real photograph and a fake one, there is something beautiful about holding something in my hand that connects me to another person in a way that is authentic and tangible and powerful.
Occasionally, I am asked if it gets lonely in my subterranean world, but the opposite is true. While hunched over these tomes, I often feel closer to my fellow human than I do upstairs, where I might actually run into one of them. In the basement, there is no irrelevant small talk, no superficial pleasantries, only truths. And the truths look a lot like my own: A well-worn paperback edition of The Devil in the White City—I loved that one too! A bookmark lodged on page 344 of War and Peace—I didn’t make it much past that either. Tomato sauce blotches on the cover of Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking—hmmm … when’s lunch?
Almost every book that crosses my desk has a story separate from the one inside it. A water-stained board book brings to mind a happy toddler splashing in the tub. A mass-market romance with paragraphs highlighted in pink marker reminds me of the books my girlfriends and I passed back and forth under the desks in study hall. A copy of The Golden Bowl with thoughtful handwritten notes in the margins gives away the shy comparative literature major who owned it. Whenever I see someone on the news expressing shock over the actions of someone they thought they knew, I think: Ignore what they told you. Ignore their happy photos on Facebook. Look on their bookshelf instead. There, they will be laid bare.
Most of the time I’m presented only with a small snapshot of a person’s life. A donation will come in, and it’s obvious from the ACT and SAT prep books, the guides to American universities, and the assortment of AP English books that this person has packed up for college and is shedding deadweight. This is true for all of life’s major transitions, including one later in the timeline, when a single crate of retirement investing books and assisted-living brochures announces someone has decided to sell the homestead and downsize.
Sometimes, several boxes will arrive all at once, and when the contents are spread out on the tables, a person’s entire life reveals itself like a bird unfolding its wings in front of me: An early edition of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. A 1960s wedding planner. The Better Homes and Gardens Decorating Book. Baby and child-care books. Martha Stewart’s Pies & Tarts. Crochet patterns. Disney World with Your Grandchildren. Living with Arthritis. Rick Steves’ Italy. I watch as the shaky cursive on the inside of the children’s books evens out over the years and then doubles back again. And even before cleaning out the predictable ticket stubs, get-well cards and appointment-reminder slips, I know these volumes belonged to a book lover and a sentimental one at that. And I’ve been consorting with bibliophiles long enough to know that any adult sentimental enough to have kept their favorite books from childhood would never part with them—ever—so now I know something I wish I didn’t: This person has died. At moments like this, I often find myself reaching for the back of my chair and sinking into it to take in the beauty and the sadness and the fullness of someone else’s life and to consider my own. Most of us will never reflect on our circumstances or document our lives in the same way an autobiographer might, but we all leave behind a story, nonetheless.
Like all jobs, I sometimes take mine home with me. But it’s not paperwork or deadlines or quotas running through my mind. It’s all the invisible people I’ve spent my days with—these ghosts—who ride home with me and torment me while I’m pulling weeds or doing dishes at the sink. The latest apparition is the newly cohabitating couple, “Doug and Lorie,” whose repurposed moving boxes arrived with fun labels like: “Doug’s Jams” and “Stuff for the Bedroom, Hubba Hubba!” Despite this, I find myself worrying about them. Judging from Doug’s discards of Noam Chomsky, Malcolm Gladwell and Simon Schama, he’s an independent thinker, someone who’s concerned with the serious political and social issues of our time. Lorie’s boxes, on the other hand, spilled over with Nora Ephron, Candace Bushnell and a puzzling three copies of The Nanny Diaries. What will they talk about at dinner, I wonder? Are they going to make it?
I wish I was the only one strangely affected by these books’ previous owners, but I’m not. Up in the library’s little used bookstore, where hundreds of donated books line the walls, I started out using only the perfect, unblemished editions for the displays until I discovered that the books that had been written in and the worn ones with crumbling spines and clues to their previous whereabouts were selling faster than I could put them on the shelves. I’m touched by this. It affirms the notion that we all have a need to connect with other people, and perhaps books, with their timeless stories and easy portability, are the perfect vessels for bringing strangers and even generations together.
There really is something special and sacred about a book, isn’t there? Our branch is located in an area of the state where new neighborhoods butt up against cornfields and rolling pastures. Occasionally, I will look up to see someone in a plaid flannel shirt with mud on their boots striding toward me with a box in their hands and a sad look on their face. This farmer, who I know in his lifetime has probably slaughtered hundreds of animals, is bringing me his books because he couldn’t stomach the thought of putting them in the trash.
“These were my dad’s,” he might say. “Can you do somethin’ with ’em?”
At times like this, I feel eerily similar to a mortician or a hospice nurse. The books I’m being handed are often in terrible shape, tragically stored in a wet basement or a mildewy attic, but the person letting them go needs me to do what they don’t know how to do or cannot bring themselves to do—extend the life of the book or carry it gently toward the finish line. I not only understand this, but I think of the books I will leave behind someday—the Nancy Drew collection with peanut butter and jelly sandwich crumbs inside, the first flower ever given to me by a boy pressed inside Prufrock and Other Observations, the baby album with a lock of hair from my daughter—and I hope whoever finds them will handle them with the respect and dignity they deserve.
There was an aunt in our family who, after a long illness in the hospital, pulled me close one night and whispered for me to bring her a book from the house. I returned with it, thinking she might want me to read it to her, but she didn’t. This story and its sequels had comforted her many times over the years, and now its simple presence in the room was soothing her again. Like all of us, I realized, she just wanted to have her best friends with her when she died.
And this is the power of the written word, is it not? Movies and music are wonderful, but when you’re in solitude with an open book and an open mind, simple black print on white paper has the power to punch you in the gut and leave you breathless. I was reminded of this earlier today when a little note card fell out of one of the donations. It was from a mother to her daughter, and it began: As I sit here at my kitchen table with the sun shining warmly on me, I realize this is how you also make me feel … and once again, I’m transported out of my own life into another’s, and I’m happy for this mother, not just because she loves and is loved, but because she had the good sense to write it down. I will probably think about this sweet woman on my long ride home tonight, or later in the evening while I’m out walking the dog, and even if I don’t pass anyone along the way, I will not feel alone.