Magical Nostalgia Tour

 

While searching my shelves for an old book that I clearly remember having purchased, I started noticing others that I haven't given any thought to in years despite how "big" they were in their day. I never did find the book I was looking for (and probably never will since so many books have passed into and out of my hands over the years that I can't remember which of them should still be with me anymore), but I ended up with a desire to experience some of those touchstone books again.

James Dickey's Deliverance is a good example. Primarily known as a Southern poet prior to Deliverance, Dickey hit the jackpot with the novel after it became a major motion picture starring Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight, among others. Even today that movie is remembered for its "Dueling Banjos" song and an iconic line that I won't be mentioning here - but you probably know the scene I'm referring to if you've seen the movie. Dickey, himself, even had a small role in the movie as a sheriff. 

I've also spotted old hardback copies of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, and Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses that I want to re-read. I'm generally not a big fan of movies made from books I've enjoyed, but these four are some of the few novels whose movie versions have impressed me as being almost as good as the source material. 

Those are just the tip of the iceberg, but they've started me thinking that its time to do a seriously deep dive into my own shelves. I've put together a decent personal library over the last decades, and I can't help but wonder what will eventually happen to all of the books. Fewer people than ever seem to have the time or the inclination to do much book-reading these days, much less the space to house them, so I fear that most will end up being boxed up and donated to charity shops at some point - if not junked entirely. It's time for me to start enjoying the books more and reminding myself why they are there in the first place. 

I need to find a better balance, I think, between older books and those being published today. It's taken a lifetime for the ones still on my permanent shelves to find their way there - and to stubbornly hold on to their spots there - and the odds of matching their quality in new books feels like those of searching for that clichéd needle in the haystack. I've said this before, but even though the eye-candy books always get me in the end, maybe this time I'll be able to find a more achievable balance between the old and the new. 

On a lighter note...

I just read an article about poisonous book covers from the mid-1800s that used arsenic or lead to produce certain shades of green cloth that were so popular back then. Apparently the covers are still so dangerous that "experts" only handle them while wearing protective gloves. The covers are more common on books with gilded lettering on them - and now I'm wondering about the Dickens books from the mid-1860s that are on my shelves. Some of them were signed by their original owner in 1867, and now I hope they didn't kill the poor woman.

Mine are considerably nicer than these, but this will give you an idea of the type of cover I'm talking about. There is supposed to be a long list of poisonous covers somewhere on the web, but I haven't found it yet. It's a bad day when even your books are trying to kill you.