With apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Instead of “water, water everywhere” I have books, books everywhere and truly not enough shelf room for them all. The dictionary defines bibliophile as someone who admires or collects books. I guess that would be me because I do both. And, as if that were not enough, I’ve started writing my own to add to the overflow. I’ll confess that I have recently discovered the allure of ebooks which don’t add anything to the shelf overload. Barbara’s and my latest cozy, Grave Shift, is available as an ebook from Amazon.
In the picture Dawn did for my blog, a few of my books are in the shelf behind me. A very few. I need a library with a wall or two lined in shelves. Sadly, I don’t have that. So, I have books in bookshelves, in magazine stands, in baskets, on tables. I believe I could decorate with books. Get rid of them, you suggest? Give them away or sell them? Oh, the terrors of trying to decide which to go and which to keep. I guess I could give my Lilian Jackson Braun set of cat mysteries to someone but I would miss them so! Never again will I find a hero to match Miss Braun’s Qwilleran with his “brooding eyes and look of melancholy.”
So, maybe I could bear to part with Mignon Ballard’s mysteries about Augusta Goodnight, “heavenly sleuth”. But, no! This light-hearted series is good to re-read and hope that we all have a guardian angel with the temperment of Augusta.
OK, so I have an overflow of Carolyn Hart’s mysteries, both paperback and hardback. But Carolyn is a fellow Oklahoman and an accomplished writer who can whisk me away from reality which is sometimes less than fun into her make believe world where everything turns out OK.
And, that’s probably the reason I write mysteries. I like to create a make believe world where, in the end, everything turns out OK. So, in the Darcy Campbell/Flora Tucker mother daughter sleuth series, Barbara Burgess and I delight in getting our heroines into some pretty fixes (as Mom used to say) and getting them out again. These gals always triumph over the bad guys due to their ability to untangle those webs of mystery.
It’s not only fiction that line my shelves and share my life. Books on history, historic persons, inspirational books, poetry, and plenty of biblical helps. Oh! and then there are the old books. I have my great-grandfather Ben Willis’ song book, that has inscribed in the flyleaf, “Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873”. And there’s an even older Bradbury’s Golden Series of Sabbath School Melodies, 1866.
Dear to my heart are the fanciful childhood books of Thornton W. Burgess and his tales of Reddy Fox and Sammy Jay. Of course, Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew books are still with me, the books which started me on this winding path of Manos Mysteries.
And then, I have my mother’s scrapbook. Priceless and cherished.
So, I guess I’ll just live with my plethora of words and love them each and every one. If given a choice of a hot caramel mocha coffee or the latest book by one of my favorite authors, I’d choose the book! Now that should be proof enough that I am indeed a hopeless bibliophile.
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