By John Krull TheStatehouseFile.com ST. LOUIS, Missouri – Some hungers don’t fade with time. I stand before the shelves of Left Bank Books in the Central West End of this old river city. I’ve come to this bookstore for decades, ever since I was in my early 20s. I was in grad school then. I’d […]
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ST. LOUIS, Missouri
Some hungers don’t fade with time.
I stand before the shelves of Left Bank Books in the Central West End of this old river city. I’ve come to this bookstore for decades, ever since I was in my early 20s.
I was in grad school then. I’d come here from my small hometown in central Indiana.
This was before the book superstores — the Barnes & Nobles and Borders — had spread across the land. My little town didn’t have a bookstore.
When I had a little money and wanted to buy a book, I could go to the drugstore to buy the latest murder-and-mayhem pulp paperback. Or I could travel to the nearest mall, where the B. Dalton carried the complete oeuvre of Danielle Steel and not much else.
It’s hard to describe the hold reading has on me.
It’s a bit like talking about love. If you can analyze it, break it down into parts and reasons, it becomes transactional, not transformational.
And it really isn’t love.
I knew from the time I learned to read there was magic in books. The cliché in this case is true. Books do take readers to different places and times. They expand horizons.
But they do something even more profound.
Reading is the most intimate artistic or intellectual activity. A skilled writer steps inside our minds. Because all the action and all the discussion take place within our thoughts, we discover parts of ourselves we didn’t know existed.
My parents had only a few books when I was a boy. Most were holdovers from their own school days.
I read them, again and again. I also started taking out as many books at a time as the school library would allow.
I remember as a third-grader working my way through the entire set of the “orange books,” Bobbs-Merrill Childhood of Famous Americans series. When I read the last one, I asked the librarian for more. She said that was it.
The news crushed me.
I reread the entire series two more times that year.
The town library helped, but also had its limitations. The librarian restricted me to taking four books out at a time. Often, that wasn’t enough to get me through a weekend.
Worse, there were times when a phrase or a fact from something I’d read would pop into my head — often late at night — and I’d want to revisit the book. But it was back at the library.
The solution, I determined over time, was to own my own books.
To have my own library, one I could visit at any time.
When I moved to St. Louis, someone told me about Left Bank Books and the long-closed and much-missed Paul’s Books in University City. It became a rare week when I didn’t visit one or both.
Wages for graduate teaching assistants, then as now, hovered below the poverty line. My appetite exceeded my means.
I passed many hours in Paul’s Books gazing with longing at the six volumes of Dumas Malone’s magnificent biography of Thomas Jefferson.
But I also remember moments of fulfillment. I found a wonderful and cheap translation of “War and Peace” in Left Bank’s used book stacks. I still recall passing long winter hours in my St. Louis apartment reading Tolstoy’s epic while the wind howled outside.
Those two bookstores opened a map for me. I now see this country as a series of book havens.
Left Bank here in St. Louis. Malaprops and the Captain’s Bookshelf in Asheville, North Carolina. The Tattered Cover in Denver. Elliot Bay Books in Seattle. Powell’s in Portland, Oregon. Faulkner House in New Orleans. Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.
All feed the hungry mind and slake the thirsty spirit.
I have my own library now.
It isn’t as large as my heart desires, but it never can be.
Some of the oldest volumes in my library came from this shop, one of the first places my soul found meat upon which to feast.
I wander through the rows of books now as I did as a young man, wondering, as I did then, which to take home with me.
A history? A novel? A biography? A volume of essays?
So many choices. So many books.
Some hungers don’t fade with time.
