I once met a retired librarian. She had been a New York City librarian for fifty years and in her eighty-seventh year she had just moved to Seattle so she could be close to her daughter. She was frail by that point and her health was going downhill. She died a year after I met her, and I was sad about it, but thankful that I had gotten to meet her.
I often have worked doing temporary projects for people in their homes so when she needed to go through her book collection and get rid of a bunch of it, her granddaughter thought of me. I lived close to her apartment, so for a couple of months I walked over there several times a week for five hours a day. We sorted through her entire book collection with me doing the heavy lifting, and physical aspects of the project.
Ruth was her name. She was fascinating to talk to. I asked her if she still read as much as she had in years past, and she said, “Oh honey, I’d go crazy if I couldn’t read.” She was not a big fan of the local branch of our city library. She thought they had a bad collection, and it was true they did. It was hard for her to spend the time in the catalogue and to order the books to be sent to her than it would have been for a younger person. So it was probably good that she had such a huge collection of her favorite books that she could dip into at any time. She was fascinating to talk to about authors too and she had met many authors in her time.
I asked her about authors as we went through her books. I got lucky because if she could tell I liked an author, and she wasn’t keeping everything she had by that author, she gave it to me. I loved the job I was doing for her, mostly because I liked her a lot, but I was very happy to have obtained some wonderful books from her as well. These days I try not to collect books since I don’t own a home of my own, but in some of my precious boxes of my favorite books that I’ve kept because I love them, I still have several of the books she gave to me.
