History of My Reading: Bookends

I'm going on with this intermittent series that now has its own label: History of My Reading.  I've added that label to prior posts, a series which began as a result of reading Larry McMurtry's memoir Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.  He wanted to figure out how he, a boy in a rural small town in Texas, wound up owning the country's biggest used books store.  That inspired me to my own ruminations and inquiries about my history of reading and relationship to books in particular.

 I mentioned that my parents--principally, I'm sure, my mother--always had at least a shelf of books in whatever served as their living room, and that this was unusual for our time and place.  I don't remember seeing books displayed in other homes I visited as a child, though perhaps I'm forgetting one or two.  But it was rare, and I've been thinking more about it.  It must have taken a certain courage to do it, and the risk of seeming different when people visited--as they did a lot; my mother was very social, especially in that first decade.  In that time and place, being called different was not often a compliment. My mother was clearly committed to displaying books as a feature of her decor.

One indication is that she had decorative bookends.  The ones I remember most clearly were two golden lions.  They looked like metal and they were heavy, though they actually were painted plaster.  Still, they had a definite heft and presence. You can just make them out behind us in the photo above of my mother and I taken in our first home, an apartment at the top of a large house on College Avenue in Greensburg, PA.

Those lions were later displayed in proper bookshelves in the living room of our new home, on a hill just outside the city limits.  That sofa also made the transition--it was a deep blue upholstered sofa with a matching chair or two.  Two later sets of furniture replaced them, but the lions stayed until both my parents were gone and the house was sold.  I thought I had kept one of the lions--slightly chipped but unbowed. Maybe not, since I can't find it now.

 I believe that to some extent those lions and her books on display were a statement my mother made about herself.  Both of her younger siblings went to college, but as the oldest who graduated high school during the Depression, there was no money to send her--not even to the local Catholic colleges my aunt and uncle attended while still living at home. As a child visiting my grandparents, I slept in the room in which my mother and aunt had slept most of their childhood and adolescence.  The bed and large dresser with the oddly shaped mirror above it that gave me nightmares, didn't leave room for much else.  I wonder if she had space for her own books, as her personal possessions and personal statements.

Maybe that was part of the dream for her own home. There did seem to be a certain aspirational quality to the display in our home, which I think my father felt as well, at least at first.

But there was another weighty bookend in our living room that tells another story.  It's made of actual bronze.

It consists of an ornate platform on which is displayed a bronzed baby shoe.  In fact, mine: their first born. I don't know that people do this much anymore, but bronzing a baby shoe was once quite a thing, at least where I lived. The internet tells me that its popularity began in the US in the 1930s, and that one company in Columbus, Ohio did the bronzing.  This shoe was bronzed in 1948 or so, and Ohio wasn't that far away.

 That it serves as a bookend tells its own story.  The parents guide to the Book House set suggests that in addition to reading to their children and giving them their own books, parents keep proper books in the house for children to see and get used to as objects, all to encourage them to read.  I'm pretty sure this was a factor in my mother keeping books on display. That's the story the bronze baby shoe bookend tells me.  I have it now on one of our living room bookshelves.