Yourself on Your Shelf
My wife and I recently had dinner with some good friends this week. They, too are in the health field and adoptive parents of medically challenged children. As you can imagine, the ladies got off on their tangent fairly quickly, with Andy and I on our own. We were soon on the subject of books we were reading - he, The Paths Between the Sea by David McCullough about the building of the Panama Canal, and me, Once Upon A Time in Russia by Ben Mezrich about the transition of the fall of the USSR into the country being run by the billionaire Oligarchs of today.
We both realized we enjoyed similar tastes, both of us also recently completed another David McCullough book, The Wright Brothers, an excellent account about the first men to fly an airplane - I recommend all of David McCullough's books if you have not had the pleasure. This led us to the idea of starting our own Inklings meetup once a month at our favorite brewhouse to discuss what we are reading - what fun don't you think?
I believe that our libraries (one wall of mine is pictured above) of books, tapes, videos and news clips are our access to the world's knowledge. It is also a great source that tells others about yourself.
Not nearly as much as I would like, but every now and then my wife and I get invited to friends’ homes for a visit. If someone we've never visited before, I will always ask for a tour of the house. As usual though, we wandered from room‐to‐room, with wine in hand, as our hosts shows us the wall hangings, colors and fabrics, lighting and furniture, flooring, wallpaper, cabinets, counters and window treatments.
The houses are quite often beautiful and full of family photos and other personal memorial items of importance to our friends, but my focus is always in their book collection. More often than not, I am amazed how many of today's homes don't have any book shelves at all.
Just to be aesthetic for a moment, books are very attractive in design and a wall of books make the best decorative mural (if that is all you're after) as they are more diverse in color and grandeur in appearance than any wallpaper. There is a restaurant in Charleston (my home) called the "Book Store" and instead of books on shelves around the dining room, they have wallpaper of books on shelves around the dining room - crazy. But books do more than decorate a room; they make it inviting; and they give it personality. I believe a home without books is like a body without a soul – you've everything you need to function but without the essence of being.
Books show themselves as being separate personalities lounging in our reading room and waiting for someone to converse with them. When I can sit alone in the room in the firelight (or since most don’t have fireplaces anymore… the light of our Olympus‐Traditional‐Ceiling‐Track‐Head‐in‐Crackled‐Bronze‐with‐Silver‐Multi‐bulb‐half‐caff‐latte’ lighting), I feel I am surrounded with intimate friends. The knowledge that they are in plain view can be both stimulating and refreshing.
I find books to be my friends, comforters and counselors, repositories of wisdom, sources of ideas, reminders of the past, projections of the future, and guides into a new realm of travels or business.
A good collection of books is like having your own “college of knowledge” giving you access to information that you are interested in and can just glance up at to find. Many times I am thinking about something and wondering where in my library I can gain some insight and just reading a title will trigger an idea or recall points I found interesting and relevant.
When I visit the home of a friend without books, I feel cheated. Just spending a few minutes looking at my friend’s bookshelves would allow me to learn more about them, their taste and interests, than I could in a half‐dozen leisurely dinner conversations.
A person’s library speaks volumes, no pun intended, about who they are as a human. A valued and cherished library reflects how you think and who you are today and who you have been in the past. At a glance, your guests know whether your interests run toward classics or bestsellers, history or politics (or both), literary fiction or travel, fly‐fishing or golf, art or engine repair.
A wildly eclectic mish‐mash says a lot about you, too – this is what my library looks like! And forget the secret ballot. Your political views are right there in plain view. It doesn't matter whether you've had the chance to read your Peter Drucker or Mike Naisbitt (business management) selections yet as the mere effort to purchase and intent to read is evidence enough. I try to keep things balanced with one or two more liberal oriented books to compare to my extended collection of biographies on our founders (who were not liberals) and more recent conservatives like Churchill, Reagan, and Thatcher. You might even learn about someone’s point of view about governments overall if you see the Federalist Papers, or the book by Morris and Linda Tannehill, “The Market for Liberty” about how governments stifle freedom and free market societies.
Your core beliefs also sit on your bookshelf. The family Bible says one thing, the entire "Koran" another (I have both!). Titles by C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton reflect a subtle theology; Karen Armstrong or the Dalai Lama, a cosmopolitan view; or The Power of Kabbalah or the Celestine Prophecy, a diversified view.
Of course, not everyone who loves books has them on display. Some, for instance, grow tired of carting them from one address to the next. This leads to tough choices, “should I dump Robert B. Parker or safely jettisoned P.G. Wodehouse?” In my case, many of my books have lived in 10 or more different dwellings during my nomadic years– more often than not the weight of my post‐graduate textbooks were the sacrifice for cost savings.
Some people over the recent years have given up reading books entirely depending on the Internet, cable TV, and movies for their news and entertainment. Since adopting 5 children, two teenagers, we realized that the TV was consuming way too much of our time. Not that we were planning to watch any specific show, but as soon as we would get home we turn on the tube for background noise (for some awful reason) and then get sucked into its draw. So, we canceled cable for the summer and turned off the TV except for the occasional Netflix movie once or twice a month as a family experience. Interestingly enough it has been 4 years and we have yet to turn it back on. Collectively, our family of seven has read well over a 100 books just this year.
When the era of the Internet kicked into overdrive with the World Wide Web a decade and a half ago, many prophets of doom predicted that printed material was at death’s door, especially heavy hardback books. And it may well be. While my father’s personal library remains thick with books and most people my parents age still use the library, most books that are purchased today are either immediately passed on (if they're good) or unceremoniously tossed out (if they're not).
Additional to the detriment of personal libraries is something that I have to admit I have been using quite a bit the past fews years. For those who insist they are done with paper, Amazons’ Kindle connects them directly to Amazon’s online library. As most people know, it allows for the immediate purchase and download of your book of choice at a discount to the bound version. Whether you use the Kindle device, or Kindle on your Apple or Android device, it will hold thousands of books including newspapers and magazines.
But what I am finding is there's something about the tactile experience of handling a book that I miss and have committed to never give up. Who really wants to curl up in front of the fire with an electronic reader? The other problem is that while I can keep the book forever in electronic form, I can’t easily pass it on to others to read. I have to admit that when Dan Brown’s novel, “The Lost Symbol,” came out I was thrilled when the morning after the release it was already on my Kindle ready to read. I quickly finished reading it and decided that I wanted the hardback version not only to let my wife read it, but also to have the story on my shelf in my library for others future entertainment.
However, we all know the value and pleasures of reading and what a personal library affords us are endless opportunities for something equally important: rereading. Alexander Green, one of my mentors in the investment arena and author of The Secret of Shelter Island: Money and What Matters and Spiritual Wealth, recently wrote about his uncle, Edgar F. Puryear, Jr., who is a military historian. Uncle Edgar spent most of his adult life studying character and leadership. Alex tells about how after interviewing more than 150 four‐ and five‐star generals over a 40‐year period, his uncle concluded that the greatest leaders, without exception, were avid readers.
In Edgar’s own published book, Marine Corps Generalship, he quotes a radio broadcast by Yale University professor William Lyon Phelps from way back in 1933:
"The habit of reading is one of the greatest resources of mankind; and we enjoy reading books that belong to us much more than if they are borrowed. A borrowed book is like a guest in the house; it must be treated with punctiliousness, with a certain considerate formality. You must see that it sustains no damage; it must not suffer while under your roof. You cannot leave it carelessly, you cannot mark it, you cannot turn down the pages, and you cannot use it familiarly. And then, someday, although this is seldom done, you really ought to return it.”
My books belong to me, yours you! I get to treat my books with that familiar intimacy that squelches any formality. Books are for our use, not for show. We should have no book in the house we are afraid to mark up or afraid to place on the table, wide open, face up or face down. A good reason for marking favorite passages in books is that this practice enables us to remember easily the significant sayings important to us during that reading and ones we can refer to quickly; and then in later years, when coming across them again, it is like visiting a forest where you once blazed a trail. You have the pleasure of going over the old ground, and recalling both the intellectual scenery you discovered and earlier versions of yourself.
Everyone should begin collecting a private library in youth – but it is never too late to start no matter your age – and don’t forget to put in your Will who will get what books from your library because if your descendants are anything like me, then they will be fighting over the 1st edition Gone with the Wind, or the series of Cliff Notes you have left from college.
Know Yourself,
DrJ
Dr. Gordon Jones is the Strategic Vice President for West Corporation, a leading consumer communications and engagement company. He is also a serial entrepreneur and health information technologist with a doctorate in health administration. His creative work has been born through his innovation development companies, Curating Health, Birddog.Ventures, and Createyourself.com, where he facilitates diverse teams of collaborators whose core business is focused on helping people and companies incubate new ideas and developing creative ways to get those ideas to market. Follow him above, and Connect with him on LinkedIn