The world is mine for the reading

To those who know me, you know that I love books. I love to look at them and to feel them. I love to read every word on every wonderful page that touches my fingers. Fingers that linger and caress the feel of a crisp page, A THICK PAGE, a thin onion-skin page, an old must-smelling page. I adore the scent of old books in second-hand bookshops, and all the different bindings in all their different colors.

I WILL GO INTO AN OLD BOOKSTORE on a rainy day just because, and walk along the creaky wooden floors, and slowly drag my hand across the spines of the books stacked along the walls or on every step of an old staircase. STEPS that go up and into ‘that secret dark room’, the one WITH DEEP CUSHIONED OVERSTUFFED CHAIRS AND A FIRE CRACKLING IN A SMALL WOOD STOVE.

I go looking for the bookshop’s HAUGHTY CATS, as every bookseller of antiquarian books has them in residence, wandering the dusty floors and shelves, as if in search of something, of someone, perhaps a kind character that will take them in. CATS that know something we do not. CATS that hear something we do not. Their world comes alive when the lock is turned, the shades have been pulled down and the lights have been dimmed. They gently peruse the bookshelves looking for the perfect nook where they will close their eyes and drift away.

My perfect ‘nook’ is in my bedroom, behind the closed door. My perfect world where the rain beats against the window in waving sheets, and I am snuggled beneath the pure comfort of linen and down. Books stacked on my night tables and on the floor as I drift into the words of another world, mine for the reading.

Silas from a A Novel Idea used bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1995. He lived there 14 years.


“Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.”
~ Robertson Davies