If you regularly read these rambles, you probably know I’m quite taken with books. I like the way they challenge and satisfy me, the way they slowly, inevitably, heighten my awareness. I like how they feel, how they smell, how they look, all snug on a shelf next to their kin, occasionally piled on a desk or the floor, awaiting their next station.
Given this affection, perhaps I should hire out as a book curator, or maybe a book stylist, two professions I didn’t know existed until recently. For more than three decades I’ve regarded myself as a book collector. Maybe now I can monetize my hobby. My credentials:
--I’ve accumulated complete collections of books by Hamlin Garland and Edna Ferber; --I’ve passed halfway to collecting all books by six other Midwestern authors: Sigurd Olson, Henry B. Fuller (Garland’s friend), Frederick Manfred, Meridel LeSueur, MacKinlay Kantor, and Vance Bourjaily; --the same status for six political/government characters, loosely defined: Hubert Humphrey and Theodore Roosevelt (books both by and about), Winston Churchill, John Kenneth Galbraith, William O. Douglas, and George Kennan, plus essayists William Safire, Robert Benchley, and Agnes Repplier, and business guru Peter Drucker; --significant holdings (although under half) by authors valued for their writing talents: Wallace Stegner, Wendell Berry, Ivan Doig (Berry and Doig studied with Stegner), Howard Mumford Jones (once Garland’s typist), Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, and Van Wyck Brooks; --works by gifted non-fiction writers/historians Bill Bryson (native Iowan), Thomas Friedman, Paul de Kruif, David Halberstam, Bruce Catton, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Page Smith, Will & Ariel Durant, and John Gunther; --poets Richard Eberhart (from nearby Austin, MN) and Ogden Nash; and. --Garland contemporaries, John Burroughs and Eugene Field.
Now the challenge is to READ these works, crying out from our shelves for my limited attention. You can tell a great deal about someone by rummaging through his/her bookshelves… or lack thereof. (Yes, amateur psychoanalysts might have a field day with my list.) Understand, my books aren’t for show; I strive to work my way through this accumulation. They all merit careful study, even Benchley and Bryson, Nash and Field, who are generally more whimsical.
In addition to new occupations, I recently encountered a fresh, persuasive justification for unread books. Summarizing here, such books maintain our humility, reminding us of things unknown, keeping us intellectually hungry, perpetually curious. According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his bestseller, “The Black Swan,” “A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are less valuable than unread ones. A private library should contain as much of what you do not know as (possible). You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older; the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.”
As for new career opportunities, a book “curator” selects volumes a client might like, buys them, and brings them into their home. Obviously, a curator needs to know clients’ reading habits. For example, as my wife notes, “Kurt prefers authors dead at least fifty years.”… a reasonably accurate assessment (see above list). But people striving to project a certain image might require the services of a book “stylist”. This is a different calling, with books becoming an affordable accessory conveying… what? A contemporary vibe, maybe cerebral heft, or diverse interests? The pandemic gave us access into people’s libraries serving as television backdrop. I can’t be the only one curious about books positioned behind these talking heads.
I stumbled upon an article claiming the right book stylist can make one appear both trendy and smart, before suggesting nine novels to advance an image along these lines. I was not only unfamiliar with these titles, I hadn’t heard of ANY of these authors. Clearly, I need a book stylist if I’m to come off as trendy and smart. And apparently, I should forego any interest in actually becoming one.
******
I’m pleased to be part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. These are my colleagues:
I have lots of small writers and a few poets since I have a large collection of "Wapsipinicon Almanacs" that was usually printed ten miles from me. I somehow was chosen to be one of those writers in the anthology of the Wapsipinicon Almanac that was recently printed by the University of Iowa.
I too think along your line as a sort of collector of books, but not as refined as you! My collecting is helter skelter, with lots of non-fiction, shall we say very dry tomes, of information on various subjects. I happen to have an example sitting right beside me at the moment, "Iowa Historical and Comparitive Census, 1836-1880". Doesn't that sound like something you just want to burn up the pages on? Both literally and figuratively! I come by this strange sort of reading material mainly because of doing archeology for over ten years and the writing often is as dry as a popcorn fart because of the use of such archaic texts! However the conclusions may be rather interesting as a result. My shelves are filled with tons of rather useless material on historical themes like the Iowa dairy industry, including cheese, the canning business in Iowa, lots of radical reading material on Socialists, strikes and people who promoted such things-Black Panthers etc., information on mills and milling, biography material on early Iowan's, local histories on places big and small in Iowa, Lots of German stuff from Northwestern Germany where family came from, reference material and writings about the underground railroad , Civil War material, of all sorts, odd lots of Wendell Berry, and other ecological writers, tons of books on the ecological poisoning of the natural world by every know and unknown chemical and then there are the writings of odd lot writers I enjoy, William Leastheat Moon among others and the always fun stuff from the 60's like "Steal this Book" by Abbie Hoffman!
So it is a clutter of maps, and books, and fliers, and anything that crosses my path that looks like I might have a look longerthan five minutes completes my hoarders collection that lies along the path to my desk top computer!