A Library, Bound In Spirit And in Print
In late March, a few days after my mother died from cancer, I sat in a cold living room in the north of England with my two sisters as a lawyer read my mother’s last will and testament.
We were told that her modest estate would be divided evenly among her three children, with one exception. “Her collection of over 3,000 print books would go to her oldest daughter, Leanne,” the lawyer said.
Upon hearing this, my sisters turned to me as tears welled up in my eyes. They knew that my mother and I had always shared an unwavering bond over books. My earliest memories take place in her bedroom, as I watched her blow- dry her hair with one hand and read a novel with the other.
As I grew up, my mother led me through the fictional worlds of Harper Lee, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. Birthdays and Christmases were always met with rectangular-shaped gifts. And every book in our home was inscribed with a pithy note. “Dear Nick. Never live without beautiful books. Love Mum,” she scribbled into a copy of “War and Peace.”
In 2011, when I was moving to California from New York, I decided to leave behind most of my books, and to give up print in favor of the Kindle and later an iPad. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she scolded me over the phone. “I didn’t raise you to read on a bloody screen.”
She spoke passionately about being able to smell the pages of a print book as you read, to feel the edges of a hardcover in your hands. And about how the notes left inside by the previous reader (often her) could pause time.
I didn’t give in. I was convinced that digital was the future. “You can’t search a print book,” I argued. “And I can carry 1,000 books in my pocket, whereas you can only get two in your purse.”
Seeing that I wasn’t going to budge, my mother tried to come to my side. This time, she held my hand as we wandered through the digitals worlds of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. But her Kindle (and later an iPad) sat mostly untouched in her office drawer. On birthdays and Christmases, heavy rectangular-shaped gifts still arrived in my mailbox. And then, in March, she died. After the will reading, my older sister sweetly offered to share my mother’s library. I gratefully accepted. And then a few weeks later, while my younger sister was going through our mother’s personal belongings, she came across something she thought I might like.
“Do you want mum’s Kindle?” she asked via text message.
Now taking a Kindle on a long trip is nothing short of magical. But that doesn’t mean I want my mother’s old Kindle to remember her by. I want to be able to smell the paper, to see her handwriting inside, to know that she flipped those pages and that a piece of her lives on through them.
I thought about the irony of the endless debates I had with my mother. Now that she was gone, all I cared about were her physical books.
As my mother approached her final days, she asked me to grab her favorite book, “Alice in Wonderland.” Inside the cover, she wrote something for my unborn son, whom she now accepted she would never meet: “May your life be filled with beautiful words. Love Grandma.” She didn’t specify whether those words should be print or digital.
If she is looking down at his nursery now, she will see that copy of “Alice in Wonderland” there, next to some of her old books, and a growing collection of new ones.