Barons of bounty favor floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that cover the entire wall of their living rooms, brimming with expensive-looking titles, perfectly arranged for show. Supermarket-style ordering, with the priciest and rarest titles placed at eye level. Not that they’d really read these–you’d have to sneak into their bedroom, dare to peek into their nightstand drawer to reveal what occupies their literary minds, assuming they read at all.
Beggars of beauty often have similar shelves, except theirs are simple wooden ones bending under the weight of books touched by hands, destinies, and even the hand of destiny, at least in this corner of the world, where mere book ownership could get you into a serious pickle for a good portion of the last century.
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Municipal Library of Prague
Being a bookworm by nature and in spirit, I had always dreamed of these saggy bookshelves. Or, more precisely, I longed for the masterpieces whose heft made the shelves sag. Roaming abandoned aisles of antiquarian bookstores in small towns, breaking through dusty spiderwebs like a wannabe Indiana Jones, I hunted down books I thought I had to possess, possessed by my dream of abundant shelves. I couldn’t do that in Prague where those very titles were priced far beyond what a teenager, and later a college student, could afford.
Eventually, I gathered quite a nice collection. Pride filled me.
Then I moved. Several times. Believe it or not, books happen to be quite a burden if you’re moving into new places you intend to call home for a while. Regardless of their brilliance.
The weight wasn’t what really mattered though. It was the dead weight. Any book that patiently waits for anyone to open it, feast their eyes on it… is in a coma. Turning dead after a couple of years. I realized most of my books were of that kind. Great, rare books. Unused. Comatose.
What did I need them for? To impress myself? Or the occasional visitors, who often didn’t really care what my shelves held? Or just to have them, an aspiring beggar of beauty myself?
Then I started giving them away. To friends. To random people. Strangers on the metro. Bar flies. On one condition – read it and pass it on to someone else. At the very least, I honored every one of these books by saving them from their near-death experience, inscribing every single one of them with a personalized note for anyone who’ll ever open it. No two were alike; each echoed the book itself, its writer, or my personal connection to it.
“I’m a book. I’m meant to be read, that’s my purpose. Read me, and then give me to anybody who might find me interesting. Don’t keep me sitting on a shelf, let me roam from one reader to another.”
That’s the general message in all of them. They were all set free. Two of them found their way back to me once, returned by a completely different person to the one I handed them to. About a year later.
It made me happier than owning all the books again. I reread these two when I got them, and then set them free for the second time.
I wonder where these books that I left behind are now. Or did I leave them behind—or did they leave me, travelling to places I’ve never seen or never even heard of? The English ones could easily travel the world on their own.
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Free to grab books
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My favorite study room in the National Library of the Czech Republic. Definitely not a minimalist place.
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