Books Do Furnish A Room

Oh friends, oh friends, oh friends: the home internet connection has been installed. I blog in comfort at a desk, using a keyboard, sitting in a comfy chair - all components of the compleat connectivity experience that I've been missing for the past three months. The computer is in the library, a cozy paneled room with built-in shelves and a radiator and a fireplace (gas, nothing currently hooked up).

This is a photo I took when we were viewing the house; somewhere in the jumble of boxes is the card reader for the digital camera, the chip of which has lots of newer pix.

When Darwin and I poked around the house right after getting the keys, we found that the previous owners had left the built-in shelves full of books. The collection was erudite: lots of collected letters or biographies of people I'd never heard of to know why their letters should be collected or their lives chronicled, and a great many novels that were considered Very Important the year they were written. Not much is newer than twenty years old; many books are much older. So far I have browsed a biography of a fellow named Trelawny, who I don't know why he's famous but he killed a crow when he was five; pondered biographies and autobiographies of Moss Hart, Zelda Fitzgerald, Tombee (a cotton planter, says the cover), and Julia Peterkin; browsed volumes of plays, letters, and journals; and considered the historical importance of Andersonville, the Constitutional Convention, Shaker furniture, Queen Victoria, and American Hymns.

A man's library is a window into his soul. Growing our own collection has always been important to us; we tend not to invest in the sort of books we wouldn't want to keep around. (Even Darwin's adolescent collection of SF is presentable, if somewhat lurid about the covers.) We're getting a sense of the previous owners through their books, and our impressions are favorable. And that's important, since they lived here for fifty years and left their mark on the house in many ways. I doubt any of our books will stay in the house whenever we move out (God forbid!), but I'd be fascinated to know what opinions a total stranger would form about us based on our library. And our bedrooms -- we keep books there, too. And our schoolroom. And our attic, and our living room... Our house is furnished and adorned with books; when you read our house, you read us.