The Elder Statesman

I recently wrote a guest column for Suzanne Beecher, who provides online book clubs for libraries and book publishers called DearReader.com and includes a daily column along with a few chapters of a book. You automatically know Suzanne’s audience. They are all are biblioholics.

I met Suzanne when I did an online interview with her for a newspaper book section. You might say it was love in cyberspace. The love being for books.

Thomas Carlyle said: "All that mankind has done, thought or been, is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books." Daniel J. Boorstein, the retired head librarian for the Library of Congress, said in a report to Congress in 1984:  "Books are the main source of our knowledge, our reservoir of faith, memory, wisdom, morality, poetry, philosophy and science."

I became a reader in my growing up years and found that the written word could take me anywhere I wanted to go. I quickly discovered I enjoyed non-fiction best, because I could learn about new places, new things, and new ideas. Even today I find pleasure in reading the encyclopedia. Even more so, I find hours of enjoyment reading dictionaries and discovering new words. Maybe that is because I am a writer.

Tony Hillerman in his autobiography, "Seldom Disappointed," describes a writer "as a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff."

If you dug around in my work space, you would agree with Hillerman’s analogy. I am a collector of bits and pieces of information, scraps of paper on which I have scribbled notes, notebooks that I have filled with information. I am a notebook keeper and have hundreds of notebooks filled with miscellany.

Every room in my house has book shelves, overflowing with books.

To be truthful, I think I prefer shopping for books in a used bookstore rather than a new bookstore. The more disorganized the store is, the better I like it because every aisle, every shelf becomes an adventure.

When I visit my daughter’s home in Eugene, Ore., I invariably slip away and walk a few blocks to a large Goodwill Store that has a separate room filled with books. The Goodwill is jokingly referred to by my daughter as dad’s bookstore. One Christmas, as a gag gift, she gave me a $5 gift certificate to Goodwill. She made it out to the "frugal book buyer." I smiled, folded it neatly and placed it in my billfold. Five dollars goes a long way when you are paying an average of 50 cents a book.

Months later while visiting my daughter I walked to my favorite bookstore. I piled up $7.50 worth of books and presented the cashier the $5 gift certificate along with my cash. The cashier called the manager, a young woman who had just graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in management.

She examined the certificate and asked me where I got it. I told her it was a gag gift  from my daughter. She wanted to see some identification and asked  for my daughter’s name and telephone number.

She called my daughter, who added to my problem by calling me "the book bandit." The manager took her seriously and called her headquarters for instructions. After a lengthy discussion, wiser heads considered that I was not a criminal and accepted the certificate as partial payment for the books, but with a reprimand that next time I have my proper name on the gift certificate, rather than "frugal book buyer."

The next Christmas, from this same daughter, I got a wanted poster seeking the arrrest and capture of the frugal book bandit. Since I write a weekly newspaper column I wrote about the incident and I received a letter of apology from Goodwill with another $5 gift certificate. I framed the letter, the gift certificate and a wanted poster for the notorious book bandit.

After my guest column appeared for Suzanne, I received 650 e-mails from fellow sufferers of biblioholism, but I would be willing to wager none have a wanted poster framed in their office.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)