Columns

Shop The Book Shop for signature literature

We’re moving.

Yup, moving northwest, to St. Charles, leaving Geneva’s quiet, neighborly Williamsburg subdivision where our two babies grew into toddlers, adolescents, and a young man and a woman.

But we’ll be back. We have our eye on an apartment about a block from the new library. Location, location, library.

Today, we’re following my son’s lead. After living with us for a few years, he’s found a house that lets in lots of daylight and the greens of trees.

Which means I’m losing weight. Oh, not because I’m doing more calisthenics or eating less. Rather, I’m “organizing,” which means clearing out what our realtor calls “clutter.”

Realtors like to show houses naked as a full Monty. I like piles. Piles of old manuscripts; tea boxes and coffee bags; shirts, khakis, shoes, and ties that retired when I did; books with dog-eared pages; favorite DVDs; and much, much more.

However, that’s the easy part. Like most good horror stories, the monster hides in the basement, sleeping silently, as long as a dragon from head to tail, covered with multicolored scales.

My library.

After forty years of hanging out in used bookstores, after innumerable undergrad and graduate English and creative writing courses, and after going to readings where I needed a signed copy of the author’s book(s), more than two thousand books line wall-to-wall bookshelves. Novels, stories, poetry, essays, literary criticism, biographies, histories, etc. Many are first editions; many are signed; all are adored.

We could take them with us. But these days I mostly search out new authors available through the library (I love you, interlibrary loan!), writers who invent and reinvent styles that blur fact and fiction; poets who write prose poems; novelists who write one-sentence tomes 800 pages long.

When my wife Tia asked the other day if I was sad about getting rid of my books, my throat constricted, and tears blurred my sight. Not from sadness, but from joy.

Because they’re going to someone who loves books, someone who will read many of them, someone who will pass these books on to more people who will love them, and maybe even read them.

About a week ago, a friend suggested I call James Joseph, owner of The Book Shop in Batavia. A wonderfully intimate book cave with an inviting glass wall entrance on River Street, the interior is lovingly informal; browsing its wooden bookshelves and bantering with other book lovers turns out to be a perfect way to spend an hour or two. Or more.

James stopped by the house to check out the collection. After pointing out where to find the different genres, I invited him to spend time with the books.

“This is amazing,” I remember him saying. He said these are the kinds of books people came into his shop to buy. He was interested in all of them.

This, to my ears, was Mozart. No, Beethoven! No, Jackson Brown!!!

“I have some friends who’ll help me box and move them.”

Now I heard Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour”; it didn’t get better than this.

Be sure to visit The Book Shop, 15 N. River Street, Batavia, 847-337-3876, open Thursday through Sunday, times vary. And if you see my name scrawled in pen on an inside cover, or an inscription from, say, Joyce Carol Oates or Pulitzer Prize-winner and U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov, remember me thanking you here for doting on books as much as I still do.

•  Rick Holinger’s book of poetry, “North of Crivitz,” and his collection of humorous essays about life in the Fox Valley, “Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences,” are available through local bookstores or richardholinger.net. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.