Treasuring Books
Love of Books
Unites People Worldwide
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I have this odd habit that nobody understands: I collect books I will never read ... books I cannot read.
On a recent vacation in Athens I bought four in Greek, which I do not speak or read. Three years before I carted home four other books from Estonia that I would never peruse -- books I had in fact read long ago in English. |
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Start from a love of books, period. Most people can relate to that.
I'm not an investor or collector. I don't have many valuable tomes in my library, and I wouldn't sell the few I have. I just love to read, quote from and occasionally reread books.
I love the sound of words, the texture of ideas in the mind, the heft of a clothbound volume in my hand. I like the feeling of kinship with authors and characters I love.
But what about books I can never read?
Bookstores in foreign countries are a marvelous window into the local culture. It's fascinating to see which books have been translated -- what appears to interest the readers in a different land. |
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Bookstores in Estonia in 1994 were not common, and the pickings were sparse. The selection of translations from English were odd and haphazard: Western classics by Poe and Doyle stood next to biographies of Pat Boone and Joan Collins.
Books also were cheap and cheaply made. Paperbacks were the norm, and "hardcover" books seemed bound with little more than stiff cardboard. Far from being pathetic, however, there was something brave and poignant in these spotty relics of a brand-new democracy, less than a half-decade free from Soviet rule.
Although "Sada Aastat Uksildust," "Prantuse leitnandi tudruk," and "Charlotte koob vorku" might not mean a lot to me, the authors' names were enough to identify these books as "One Hundred Years of Solitude," "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and "Charlotte's Web." |
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It was more of a challenge to decipher titles and authors rendered by the Greek alphabet. Scanning the covers was like cracking a code; I experienced mini-epiphanies each time a familiar name rose slowly out of the strange script, like an image on print paper in a darkroom bath.
If I hadn't run across a book with a photograph of John Fowles on the cover (I had done my undergraduate thesis on "The Magus"), I would never have recognized his name in Greek. I also found a Greek edition of T.S. Eliot's cat poems.
Why did I buy them? Perhaps it's a sense of connection with those distant readers who know -- or could know -- the same pleasures I have known. A sense that these books embody the hope for a growing commonality, that we are indeed (or are finally becoming) one world. |
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It seemed especially apropos that I found in both countries a local version of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," that portrait of a future dystopia in which books are feared and routinely destroyed, and the heroes are an underground network of people who memorize books to preserve them for a friendlier time. |
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And it seemed only right that, when we reached U.S. Customs -- unlike the clothing, jewelry, spirits and other knickknacks, we brought back with us -- the books were allowed in tax-free.
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DAVID LOFTUS
David Loftus - Writer