A coworker recommended that I check out a local bookstore that is known for its rare, used and out-of-print titles. I practically salivated at the thought there was one I hadn’t heard of yet and a mere ten miles away. A new musty, dusty haven for the bookworm addict in me to explore? I was like a thirteen-year-old girl who had just had someone wave Hannah Montana tickets under her nose.
So while the rest of the country ate hotwings and watched teenybopper, bare midriffs, and scruffy, aging musicians grace their hi-def TVs washing it all down with beer for Superbowl Sunday—I set out on my journey through the ages. As I entered the Shire Bookshop in a dilapidated mill building in Franklin, Massachussetts I knew I was “home” immediately if only from that familiar welcoming moldy/musty/dusty eau de olde with an “e” that I whiffed in greedily. The books were piled almost to the ceiling. Where to start?
I wandered and meandered letting the books talk to me and I grabbed a few and sank into the couch that was so beat up that even college frat boys might turn their noses up … but I was a cat in sunlight. Hours went by as I returned my pile and exchanged it for a new one. I turned yellowing pages delicately, reverently thinking of all the fingers before mine who had turned all of these pages, too. They may have been used but to me they gleamed with the new promise of opening up as yet unforeseen doors in my mind.
My best discovery was a little book called, The World Beautiful by Lilian Whiting. As I thumbed through, I felt so excited to learn that this woman had been about a century ahead of her time as far as her metaphysical ideas and her turns of phrase were pure poetry. The book was bound in turquoise cloth and embossed with little golden flowers. I knew it was coming home with me.
It reminded me so much of some of the books my Nana used to have on her bookshelf. She used to read us the best stories with whimsical line drawings at the top of each chapter, cherubs holding the globe, fleur de lis or sceptres or crowns on the spines. It was the golden details that made these books special. It was the words within that acted as magic carpets transporting us to realms of the mummy kings buried under pyramids in Egypt or swashbuckling pirate tales mingled with poetry about fields of flowers under dappling sunlight and cloudless blue skies that made them beautiful. It brought the world into our imaginations and our only limitations were the curtains that were drawn as the words “The End” would be accompanied by a goodnight kiss and smoothing back of hair from our brows while the dreams began to form made up of circus animals and traveling gypsies.
In the Shire Bookshop I was five, eight, ten, fifteen again. My thirty-six (almost thirty-seven-year-old) self vanished until it was time to drive home. The World Beautiful, indeed. To quote my new/old long passed over to her own golden light friend Lilian Whiting:
“Follow it, follow it, follow the gleam.”—LW c.1897
