The resplendent days of beautiful collections continue. Something feels different on Richmond. Perhaps it is the promise of weather changing, or maybe it is the communal recognition that life will soon return to familiar routines as school begins and the decrepit heat of London will shift with gusty invitations from the North Wind to relax in sweaters. Both of us rejoice at the idea of this heat transforming itself into cooler days and nights. Other bookish people may feel the same. Is there any season more suited to reading than autumn? As the days get a little less post-apocalyptic, it’s time to haul books into your truck or reusable grocery bags and lug them down to your local bookseller to renew your pile of titles to read.
There’s a tone to this week’s new arrivals selection. Lots of literature — classics especially — and beautiful books. Leather bound or decorative buckram. There’s a bunch of Folio Society books. There are “cheap” editions of British authors. A few outliers snuck in (well, we held the door for them, really) but mainly it’s women reclining in fields with flowers or stodgy British men surveying their classy lives with ease and exactitide. Much if it is standard but the editions are nice so…a cut above the rest in that way.
Our favourite collection this week was the from the library of a Canadian Literature scholar. We drove out of town to their darling house which was surrounded by a decades-long tended garden. It was a little Italy in Southwestern Ontario, with a gorgeous private gathering place just off the street behind a fence, a windy path along the side of the white stucco house, and a book room off the back like a secret bookshop. She had paintings by Jack Chambers in her library. She had bookcases filled with old poetry. It was the sort of place we feel we have to write about to counter feeling these sorts of places no longer exist. But there she was, complaining about her computer, damning it really (she had another book due), when all she wanted to do was sit in her garden.
Driving back, our van full of books, we chatted about how difficult it must be to live today if you are an English scholar. We wondered at how challenging it is to build that kind of life. You can’t just WILL that kind of life to happen. You must make it slowly over time. We got to just walk into a beautifully made scene straight from a novel, and feel, ignorantly, that it just appeared from a passion for Arts and Letters, but the grind of building something, whether it is a bookshop or a library or a book or a thesis or WHATEVER your heart makes real, isn’t ever easy, is it?
This lovely woman built this beautiful place for herself partly by loving Canadian writers and writing about them, but mostly by loving beautiful things. She was so light and happy among her books that our ironic, melancholic dispositions hardly knew what to do with themselves. We felt like two lost people in a wood finding a sunny clearing, still lost, of course, but momentarily stunned to relief. Then we wondered about ourselves and our friends and all of the beautiful worlds they’re making, or trying to make.
We knew that you do not choose to be an artist for the earthly riches, unless your riches are clearings in a wood or, in our case, spooky, haunted houses in the very same forest. Brian Eno said that art is everything that doesn’t need to exist. Perhaps this kind lady knew how to make sense of it all. She didn’t tell us. We didn’t ask.
But she did have nice books, and next week’s email will have some of them.
Until then,
Jason and Vanessa
