University of Nevada study: Books in the home

On a recent visit to my parents, my dad and I walked over to the public library. While he went in search of the titles on his list, I wandered to the nearest shelf and scanned the rows of books for a volume thin enough to be read in entirety while I waited. My fingers found Anna Quindlen's memoir How Reading Changed My Life. I settled into a rocking chair, and read it through. I found many lines poignant enough to jot down in Notes on my iPhone to be transferred to my Moleskine of quotes; the measure of a worthy read. One such line that has stuck with me:

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."

I've written before on the indispensability of books in my living space, but always from the standpoint of aesthetics, and maybe comfort. But a new 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, a University of Nevada associate professor of sociology and resource economics, declares that books in a family's home in fact correlate with more and better schooling for children. Some key findings, via Nevada News:

• "Having books in the home is twice as important as the father’s education level."
• "The difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) compared to having parents who have a university education (15 or 16 years of education)."
• "Having as few as 20 books in the home still has a significant impact on propelling a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater the benefit."

I am fortunate enough to have been raised in a bibliophilic family, with parents and aunts and uncles and cousins who love reading. My childhood home has bookshelves in multiple rooms stocked with volumes of every stripe, from beach-worthy creased paperbacks to a tired encyclopedia collection to a Shakespeare tome to dense non-fiction hardbacks whose very jacket descriptions are a mental strain. Visits to the library were regular, trips to the bookstore were standard. To this day one of the first questions I ask my dad, to catch up: "What are you reading?"

This study, entitled "Family scholarly culture and educational success", implies that my book-soaked environment would have been sufficient to fuel me for 17 years of academic success even if I weren't also so lucky as to have two college-educated parents whose intelligence motivated me to reach for the A. I would always wonder, "How do they know all these things?" whether it be how to flute a pie crust (okay, that was a recent one) or how to sew a button or what 'encomium' means or how airplanes fly. My parents are naturally smart, yes, but their affinity for reading was also a key factor in my awed perception of their intellect.

Edan Lepucki, blogger on The Millions, has the same notion of books-on-display connoting something meaningful about their owner:

"If a stranger came over to our apartment, and there weren’t books, or–oh no!–not enough books, what would that say about me and Patrick? If my copy of Handmaid’s Tale or his copy of The Power Broker weren’t on display, how would anyone understand us? Some people have a cross in their home, or a mezuzah on their doorjamb. I’ve got nine books by Vladimir Nabokov."

Evans's data are from 70,000 cases from 27 nations. Her conclusions are wide-reaching geographically, but also metaphorically in the examination of the current state of the book world. I don't imagine that the breadth of a parent's eReader library would have the same impact on a child as a visible, touchable 500-book library. I would have had no idea whether my parents were reading email, or browsing The New York Times, or scrolling through New Yorker cartoons, or reading a digital version of Paradise Lost.

The takeaway? Go buy a book. And put it on a shelf.

Stalking the Stock

"Birds of a feather flock together," the saying goes. Translation: you can judge people by the company they keep. I've taken this a step further: I cop to judging people by the literary company they keep.

The first thing I'm drawn to in someone's apartment, or house, or office, is their book collection. I can't help but pass some light judgement based on their reading material. The New York Times' Book Bench blog has a feature called The Subconscious Shelf wherein readers submit snapshots of their bookshelves for analysis.

The "Subconscious Shelf" bolsters my view that you can judge people by their (book) covers. You can glean what genres and time periods and authors interest them most, yes, but you can also gauge their personality: a Dave Barry collection amid the great classics suggests a sparkle of wit in an otherwise serious academic; a Dan Brown novel among contemporary Pulitzer- and PEN/Faulkner- winners conveys a desire to treat the modern literary landscape democratically, politics-driven award committees be damned. The way a reader organizes their shelf also speaks volumes: are they scatter-brained-professor disheveled, fastidiously color-coded neat, architecturally inclined?

Stacked Up TV Productions is another initiative in highlighting readers', in this case specifically writers', shelves. The company's blog explains,

"A mashup of MTV’s Cribs, Oprah’s Book Club and The Paris Review, each five-minute Stacked Up episode features one of your favorite writers giving an insider’s tour of his or her library. We’ve found the best way to know writers is by the books they keep."

Readers beget writers, so what better tool of analysis of a writer than to "read"- evaluate- their collection of books? Of course, this appraisal is lost with the advent of eReaders. With covers masked and physical book collections dwindling in favor of Kindle- and Nook-loadable texts, the opportunity to uncover even a tidbit of insider information about a reader is dissolving. That is, unless we can outpace technology's seam-ripping of the integrated reading community and simply ask someone, "What do you like to read?"

Happy National Library Week 2010

The American Library Association's theme for the 2010 National Library Week, April 11-17: "Communities thrive @ your library." Hokey? Yes. True? Yes. Underemphasized? Oh, yes.

I wrote my college thesis on the Free Library of Philadelphia, a documentary for which I spent the whole of second semester senior year hanging out at the West Philly branch trying to sew myself into the seams of the place. I made friends with the librarians, the part-time shelvers, a few regulars like homeless Lionel Smith who I took to McDonalds across the street for a Filet-o-Fish. I've always been a bookworm and, more relevant, a library lover. I got a blue and white plastic library card in elementary school and actually used it. Even at my grandmother's beach house in Delaware my parents would take me to the local library to check out books. There's a beautiful rawness to used books, a rich backlog of other pairs of hands that have touched the same pages you're touching. Like tire tracks on a dirt road. I keep an envelope of objects I find in library books: a bandaid in its creased wrapper, a mini yellow Post-It scrawled with a phone number, a quarter-sheet cardstock flyer for a long-ago concert. (There's a Flickr feed "Library Finds" with the same objective.) I miss the days when the inside of library books' back covers bore the date stamps of past readers, a haphazard spooling column of blue ink recording in permanence each temporary possession of the volume.

But although today's libraries have hitched themselves to the technology bandwagon alongside every other sector of the book industry (Skokie, Illinois librarian Toby Greenwalt writes in the Huffington Post of libraries' downloadable collections, text message librarian correspondence, and mobile-optimized sites) the charm and merit and, most importantly, necessity of these institutions has not lessened. The architectural beauty of libraries symbolizes their magnitude (see the Huffington Post's slideshow of "America's Most Amazing Libraries" in honor of National Library Week, and the below video of Louis Kahn's New Hampshire library):

Source: Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Of course, aesthetics aside, libraries offer a social nerve center for a community just as the ALA's motto insists. Some character sketches from my time spent at the Walnut West branch illustrate libraries' role as neighborhood concourse. I met kids like 17-year-old Ryan Baginski, in his cocked white ball cap and struggling fuzz of upper lip hair, who goes to Walnut West three times a week to do schoolwork like his Martin Luther King, Jr. research project; the high school library closes when classes let out, and Ryan's family can't afford a computer or encyclopedia set. The flyers in the library lobby- “Talk About It: Youth Violence”- indicate the significance of providing a safe space for potentially troubled youth like Ryan. I met strapped-for-cash hobbyists like construction worker and SAT tutor 26-year-old Zac Brooks, trying to indulge his passion for graphic design when he can't afford lavish coffee table art books from Barnes & Noble. I met foreigners trying to cobble together some self-taught English so they can apply for jobs. I met toddlers giggling and bouncing like popcorn during the daily story hour, the only reading time they'll get with their parents- or single parent- working triple shifts.

The positive influence Philadelphia's library system fosters is obvious, but so can libraries hold such power in areas that aren't downtrodden. They provide boundless archives of photographs (see the New York Public Library's photostream on Flickr), an invaluable human resource that shatters the bun-and-glasses stereotype (see Flavorwire's list of the 10 Best Songs About Libraries and Librarians and, on a more serious note, The New Yorker's and Slate's interviews with Marilyn Johnson, author of the librarian-centric This Book Is Overdue!), and a wellspring of reading material that is cost-free.

Jamie LaRue outlines on MyLiblog seven arguments for building new libaries, in an age when cities short on funding are shutting them down. His Argument #1 reads, "We are the business that (at least in most communities) never goes out of business." Here's hoping.

"Leaves spin up into coilings and subside.
This windy much-ado, arising
from
The desert could well serve as epitaph
For Alexandria, Rome,
Pergamum --

For all the ancient libaries whose collections
Have
vanished in a mammoth wordless void.
And though I have the evening clouds'
confections,
Thoughts of the art and science thus destroyed
Leave me a
little empty and unnerved.
The consolation? Some things were preserved,
Technology now limits what is lost,
And learning, as it's presently
deployed,
Is safe from any partial holocaust."

-from Timothy Steele's "The Library"

Judging books by their covers

"A home without books is like a room without windows."
—Henry Ward Beecher

The extent of my interior decorating acumen lies in duplicating Ikea displays. They might as well shoot the catalogue in my apartment. My mom does have a keen eye for décor, so in my various residences she's shouldered the burden of coaxing some semblance of tolerable furnishing out of the space. The layout of the living room? Her plan. Color scheme? Her suggestions. The arrangement of bedroom furniture? Hers. Left to my own devices, I'd be living in a hovel.

I will say that there is one aspect of interior design in which I consider myself adroit and I enjoy: the arrangement of my books. In my current apartment I have several bookshelves of varying heights and woods, plus another in the form of my kitchen counter (just cookbooks and cocktail guides), and my coffee table. Trinkets polka-dot each assemblage of books, from the green and white tea set a family friend gave me for graduation to motley picture frames to a painted wood Bahamaian seated man, legs hooked over the edge of a shelf. I haven't invested in any spiffy bookends yet, but I feel the itch. Especially after reading a DesignSponge blog post about them:

In June when I unpacked the cardboard boxes and rope-handled shopping bags and canvas totes I'd gorged with all my books, the collection was almost card-catalogued. Shakespeares together, Pulitzer winners bundled, Greek mythology collections in another row, art history tomes aligned. But over the months of settling in, these crisp classifications have lazed away. When I finish a book, I slide it where it works aesthetically, rarely paying heed to genre or author or award groupings. Browsing is more fun when haphazard anyway. I just love the idea of living with books, appreciating them for their appearance as much as their content, like a bright bowl of juicy oranges on a clean white countertop. Books are also good conversation pieces. Often I'll end up loaning one or two to a visitor whose eye is drawn to a particular title, or who asks for a recommendation.

Turns out I'm not the only one who takes pride in their books-as-décor. Ideas abound.

The Strand Book Store in New York offers customizable books-by-the-foot libraries organized by subject. The options range from cliché antique leather:

to miscellaneous dollar paperbacks:

Part of the spice of my book collection is in my personal curation- these are books I selected, pored over, annotated, hold dear. I wouldn't pay to have someone stock my own library, but at least it brings physical books into people's homes. Another concept that accomplishes that: the British architecture firm Levitate's bookshelf staircase.

Unnegotiably being installed in my first house. Clever bookcases are indeed another brushstroke on the books-as-décor palette in differentiating a living space from dreaded carbon copy Ikea displays. Another example (although more negotiable than the staircase...):

Or the more austere:

The uniformity of these inwardly-faced spines is visually pleasing but the whole point of displaying my books is in presenting (okay, bragging over) the titles themselves. But what about when my collection inevitably outgrows my square footage? True, I've been reading more library books lately, and I'll eventually cave and give eBooks a test run, but I'm still welcoming physical books permanently into the masses, be they my own purchases, gifts, or sly appropriations from my mom's book drawer. I may have to resort to this:

Or else build my own bookshelves.

However I continue to enhance my book display, I'll relish the art. Hopefully before I reach the point of legitimate bibliomania, like New Jersey's Irving Leif, a 62 year old book collector about to be evicted for owing rent, desperate to save his $1,000,000 rare book collection. If I win the lottery this year: Irving, you know how to reach me.

A word on the sentimentality of books

My grandmother passed away this past Thursday. She was a writer, and a reader, and an editor, and an English teacher, and a crossword puzzler, and a Scrabble player. She was my long-time pen pal, writing me weekly letters throughout my three summers at sleepaway camp and four years at Penn. She taught me, long before we learned the Hamburger Model in elementary school, how to construct a cogent essay. She expanded my vocabulary with Boggle games, forming words I had never heard of with the letter cubes. She got me hooked on The New Yorker.

I'll never forgive myself for not keeping her letters. I looked forward to each one. But what I would give to have thought to collect them, as a physical token of our relationship, as a trace of her, as a comfort now that there is a hole to fill.

Fortunately, as I was packing my bags to return to Philly, I came upon a musty olive green hardcover book on my shelf. Its paper dust jacket was a little ragged at the edges. Its pages were yellowed. Graham Greene- The Comedians, the time-bleached cover read. Penned on the title page: "Sarra Chernick, 1966". It was one of her favorite books, according to my mom. I remember my grandmother gifting me several dear volumes when I was much younger, knowing I had inherited her bookworm tendency, with the caveat that the books may be reading for a later date. So they remained in safekeeping on my shelf, until I discovered this one in particular.

I don't know if I believe in fate; but the truth is that I had been hearing the name Graham Greene referenced in literary conversation, and read of him in many book blog posts, over the past few months. I had added him to my list of authors to check out. This name recognition is why I slid the green volume out from between its neighbors in the first place. Fate or not, how fortuitous! The capricious browsing lent to readers by bookshelves, rather than virtual libraries, led me by happenstance to a connection with my grandmother when she is no longer here to hand me a book.

I may not have her letters; the crossword puzzles we solved together may have been long ago crumpled into the trashcan, the Scrabble tiles and Boggle cubes jumbled back into the box. But I have this book. I can hold it, and smell it, and know that her pen was poised, fingers pressed precisely (she also taught me correct penmanship) at this very spot one moment many years ago. It's ludicrous to even consider that retaining a deceased relative's Kindle, or Nook, or Tablet, or iPhone Stanza app, would be so resonant. I will keep this book forever. It's not sappy to say that I will cherish it, too, forever. And so will I keep and cherish the serendipity of physical books, aligned on bookshelves, subscribed by hand, some once held by my grandmother, who I will miss very, very much.