The Book-Lover's Regrets

All book collectors, book lovers, and booksellers live with a host of regrets: the books you didn’t buy, the books you sold and shouldn’t have, the books you bought and wish you hadn’t. And when book-people get together, the conversation often turns to conjuring up the ghosts of these regrets. It becomes a kind of bonding exercise.

I got thinking about this as I was going through our  little collection of books by the writer-illustrator Maurice Sendak (1928-2012). I have loved Sendak’s work ever since my son was given In the Night Kitchen (Harper and Row, 1970) for his third birthday. Winner of the Caldecott Medal for 1971, In the Night Kitchen instantly became required nightly bedtime reading in our house. We knew every word by heart, my son and I, we rejoiced together in little Mickey’s journey through the bakery, and we laughed together – every night, as if we’d never seen it before – at the image of the little boy emerging from the cake batter.  

But to my surprise, not everyone thought I was showing sufficient parental care in allowing my son to be exposed to this book. Because our young hero Mickey is occasionally nude, In the Night Kitchen is enshrined at number 24 on the American Library Association’s list of 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books for 1990-2000, and has been banned from school libraries all around the country. The ALA Banned Books Week, just finished for this year, always brings naked Mickey to 

mind

But banned or not, I was hooked on Maurice Sendak. And here’s where the regret comes in. A few years after I had started my personal collection of Sendak books, I was in a second-hand book shop in Chicago and in a section of $3-apiece clearance books (mostly well-used and out-of-date textbooks) I found the most difficult-to-find of all Sendak books: Atomics for the Millions (McGraw-Hill, 1947). An ordinary grade-school science book, it contains Sendak’s very first illustrations in a published book. Truth be told, on that day in Chicago there was not one copy but two copies on the shelves.  And I bought only one of them. It seemed to me then that spending 6 dollars on two identical copies of the same book was a trifle reckless. And I have regretted it ever since.

Evidently, I didn’t learn much from my mistake. And since then the regrets have just kept on piling up: a pristine 2-volume set of Fridtjof Nansen’s In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times (William Heinemann, 1911) left at a charity bookstore in Cambridge, England, a small collection of scholarly books on the Radical Reformation at a going-out-of-business sale in Arlington Texas, a copy of Robert Ridgway’s Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (Privately Published, 1912) left behind at a library book sale in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

The books that got away. The books I turned my back on. The books that my mother’s voice in my head (“You don’t really want THAT, do you?”) kept me from buying, The books that the wide streak of Puritanical self-denial in me wouldn’t allow me to have. The trail of book-lover’s regrets that litter the past.

I’d like not to think that all this is some sort of metaphor for life. But I’m afraid that it just might be exactly that.