On Being a Bookworm

• My Autobiography
• Art Mysteries
• Book Doctors
• Books About Writing
• Books and Films In A Corporate Setting
• Closed Society Mysteries
• The Golden Age of Detective Fiction
• Hooks, Lines and Sequels
• Literary Agents I Have Known
• On Being a Bookworm
• Settings: Cornwall
• Settings: Oxford
• Writing Classes
• Writing Conferences
• The Horse Shows the Way

          Most damning, I adored libraries:  I checked out armloads of books every week, working my way through the fiction alphabetically by author.  In high school, I volunteered to assist the school librarian, because (although I didn’t say so) I loved the look of books, the orderly rows of them, the feel of them, the smell of them. Working in the space where they were housed was almost a religious experience. 

          At college, books remained my best friends, but I continued to worry about that “love of books not boys” label: were they really mutually exclusive? Couldn’t a bookworm also be admired by the opposite sex, even be sexy and glamorous? I was forced to admit that in the late 1950s in North Carolina there was a great divide between the bookish and those bored by books:  the latter rarely visited the library, while the former were seldom seen with football players and other college heroes at beer joints. 

          I found no soul-mates at Duke.  Some of my most brilliant classmates—Elizabeth Dole, for example, in those days Liddy Hanford from Salisbury, NC—presented a façade of helpless stupidity, as in a drawled, “Oh, I just know I flunked my French exam,” while secretly headed for Phi Beta Kappa.  I found their wide-eyed idiot acts tiresome, but I also disliked the pretentious greasy-haired girl-grinds.  Where were the women who couldn’t live without books, but who also loved to dress up and go to parties, and who dreamed of dancing until dawn?

          After I moved to New York I finally began to encounter—mostly read about—women who shared my values, feelings, and experiences.  I learned that there were others whose mothers despised their bookish daughters.  Oprah Winfrey told a Life reporter. “I remember being in the back hallway when I was about nine—I’m going to try to say this without crying—and my mother threw the door open and grabbed a book out of my hand and said, “You’re nothing but a something-something bookworm.  Get your butt outside! You think you’re better than the other kids!”[1]  Ms. Winfrey’s mother’s assumption that a bookworm thinks of him or herself as superior had a familiar ring; I, too, had been told that I “thought I was so smart,” and urged to “go play outside” like other more desirable and “normal” children. 

          To my astonishment, I learned that others had fallen in love with libraries.  I wish I’d known the eight-year-old Amy Tan, who wrote that learning seemed “to turn on a light in the little room in my mind,” and that “books seem to open many windows in my little room.”[2]  I was thrilled with Annie Dillard’s description of writing a book in the Hollins College library at night—letting herself into the locked, dark building where she wrote alone till “midnight, one or two.”[3]  Despite the eerie atmosphere she described, Dillard didn’t sound frightened; she wrote about those dark rooms as if she were in a safe haven, protected by walls of books. 

          Envy almost overcame my delight when I read about Anne Fadiman’s childhood.  A part of “Fadiman U.,” she and her family “gathered around the television set for…GE College Bowl.”[4]  At Fadiman U., a bookworm was not a girl denigrated for her love of books, but the hero of a children’s story:  Wally the bookworm had “lexicographic adventures”[5] and ate only very long words, amusing and enriching Fadiman children and those who, like me, read about him in Fadiman’s book. 

          Above all, I found soul mates in Anna Quindlen and Lynne Sharon Schwartz.  We shared both a general passion for books and reading, and some specific likes and dislikes (all three of us disliked Moby Dick, and loved A Little Princess.) 

          But my feelings of being set apart—different—welled up again when all around me I heard the voices of those who would replace my beloved books with computer screens.  How could they?  I agreed with Schwartz, who pointed out that “living by the word, by organized series of words, which is narrative, is a handicap when it comes to operating modern electronic devices like telephone answering machines or VCRs (not to mention computers and the phantasmagoric reaches of E-mail).  Such ineptness is not due, as laughing children suppose, to quaintness or premature senility.  It is simply that readers are accustomed to receiving information in the narrative mode.”[6] 

          Yes, dear reader, and we are also used to responding in writing.  The most recent IQ test I took was oral, because so many people today lack reading and writing skills.  I, on the other hand, felt disadvantaged, as I am used to not only reading questions, but answering them in writing. 

          As Quindlen insists, “a computer is no substitute for a book”[7] and “It is not possible that the book is over.  Too many people love it so.”[8]  Nevertheless, some frightening steps have been taken towards ruining the wonderful world of books by what is described as “advances” in technology. 

          More and more, access to books has become computerized.  I was horrified when some years ago I arrived at the library of The Museum of Modern Art, and discovered that the card catalog had been removed, perhaps even destroyed; the only way to research the files of clippings on art and artists was by computer.  The absence of a card catalog spoiled that library for me; its soul was gone.  I regret that I once contributed financially to that library; I shudder at the possibility that my dollars might have been used to help kill the card catalog. 

          Most people don’t share my interest in card catalogs, so I was fascinated by Nicholson Baker’s essay, “Discards,” in which he points out the problems and difficulties, the shortsightedness, of discarding card catalogs.  Even worse, he discusses the huge number of errors in computerized card catalogs.  He wrote, “the real reason to protect card catalogs is simply that they hold irreplaceable intelligence of the librarians who worked on them.”[9] 

          After reading Baker’s essay, and experiencing vanishing card catalogs, I struck a blow for readers.  A few years ago, my husband and I moved our thousands of prints and the library to support them—hundreds of books and files—to a building acquired to house everything, and established The Print Research Foundation.  At the same time, we bought a card catalogue for the book collection.  Yes, those old-fashioned drawers are still being made, as are the cards, hole-punched to fit on the rods that hold them in place in the drawers.  Our card catalogue is in a prominent location at PRF.  (For more on PRF, see http://www.printresearchfoundation.org). 

          I have accepted my role in life.  Anna Quindlen wrote that she’d received a letter from a girl “who had been given one of my books by her mother, and began her letter, ‘I guess I am what some people would call a bookworm.’  So am I,” Quindlen wrote back.[10]  And I cheerfully declare—so am I!

Footnotes