Books and Libraries: Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series)

Product Description

An enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets anthology that testifies to the passion books and libraries have inspired through the ages and around the world

Books have long captured the love, imagination, even the veneration, of readers everywhere. Emily Dickinson envisions these precious objects as “Frigates” that “take us Lands away”; Alberto Rios calls them “the deli offerings of civilization itself.” This affection extends to the hallowed gathering places of the written word: the libraries and bookshops where one can best hear “a choir of authors murmuring inside their books,” as Billy Collins has it.

The poets collected here range from the writer of Ecclesiastes in the third century BCE through such pillars of world literature as Catullus, Horace, T’ao Ch’ien, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Pierre de Ronsard, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Wordsworth; more recent luminaries include Jorge Luis Borges, C. P. Cavafy, Gabriela Mistral, Wallace Stevens, Iku Takenaka, Pablo Neruda, Wislawa Szymborska, Maya Angelou, and Derek Walcott.

A remarkably diverse treasury of literary celebrations,
Books and Libraries is sure to take pride of place on the shelves of the book-obsessed.

About the Author

ANDREW SCRIMGEOUR is Dean of Libraries Emeritus, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. He is Archivist Emeritus of the Society of Biblical Literature and the founding archivist of the American Academy of Religion. His essays and short stories have been published in
The New York Times.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FOREWORD

Ever since Johannes Gutenberg transformed the printing of books, making them available to a wider public, books have captured the imaginations of readers everywhere, inspiring love, and even veneration. Indeed, books may be unrivaled in evoking such bonedeep affection. William Wordsworth said that these page-packed parcels have wings to take us ‘as far as we can go’, to ‘wilderness and wood, / Blank ocean and mere sky’. For Alberto Ríos, they are ‘the deli offerings of civilization itself ’. When you enter a room full of books, even if you don’t take one off the shelf, William Gladstone observed, ‘they seem to speak to you, to welcome you’.
 
They also ask to be handled. As Rosemary Griebel put it, books wait ‘like abandoned dogs / for the warmth of hands on their spines’. Books are meant to be caressed, page by page, with a gentle downward motion, sometimes with a touch of moisture from the forefinger, as the reader leans attentively over them.
 
Books awaken all the senses, and many people name the sweet, musty autumn scent in libraries and used bookstores as among their favorites, along with freshly cut grass and bread baking in the oven. Robert Chapman evokes that olfactory delight: ‘Amidst the sweets and / Dust of the stacks / I edge from book to book like a grimy kid, / Flattening his nose against an infi nitude / Of candy store and bake shop fronts.’
 
So we line our walls with them, spend the milk money on them, read them aloud, converse with them, argue with them, annotate them, learn from them, raid them, edit them, translate them, write more of them, and fail to winnow them – reaping the displeasure of our spouses and partners who threaten to turn us out of our book-crammed homes.
 
Our adulation of books naturally extends to the consummate book
place – the library. We remember and honor the awe-inspiring reading rooms with their stained glass, inexhaustible holdings, and sequestered places in the stacks where, with Billy Collins, one might hear ‘a choir of authors murmuring inside their books / along the unlit, alphabetical shelves’.
 
Over the years as a dean of libraries, I loved being alone in the library at night after hours, especially in winter as snow fell. The library in its warm calm had the feel of a snug subterranean greenhouse – a place where texts slumbered like seeds in their stiff jackets, awaiting