The Echo of Old Books

by Barbara Davis

This book is dedicated to the librarians and the booksellers . . . Custodians of imagination, feeders of hungry hearts, matchmakers of the written word. Where would we be without your labors of love?

There is nothing quite so alive as a book that has been well loved. —Ashlyn Greer, The Care & Feeding of Old Books

There’s nothing more personal than a book, especially one that’s become an important part of someone’s life.”

“Books are feelings,” he replied simply. “They exist to make us feel. To connect us to what’s inside, sometimes to things we don’t even know are there. It only makes sense that some of what we feel when we’re reading would . . . rub off.”

Psychometry. The term had been coined in 1842 by physician Joseph Rodes Buchanan, and in 1863 a geologist named Denton had published a book entitled The Soul of Things. In short, she was a kind of empath, but for books.

Books were safe. They had plots that followed predictable patterns, beginnings, middles, and endings. Usually happy, though not always. But if something tragic happened in a book, you could just close it and choose a new one, unlike real life, where events often played out without the protagonist’s consent.

We read not to escape life but to learn how to live it more deeply and richly, to experience the world through the eyes of the other.

He said all truly good writing—fiction or nonfiction—has a heartbeat, a life force that comes from the writer, like an invisible cord connecting them to the reader. Without it, the work is dead on arrival.”

Like people, it is the books with the most scars that have lived the fullest lies. Faded, creased, dusty, broken. These have the best stories to tell, the wisest counsel to offer.

To read a book is to take a journey, to travel into a vast unknown, to hear the voices of angels both living and dead.

We develop a particular fondness for our favorite books, the way they feel and smell and sound, the memories they invoke, until they begin to exist for us as living, breathing things.

In the happiest times of my life, I have reached for my books. In the saddest times of my life, my books have reached back.

In every wound, there is a gift. Even the self-inflicted ones.

The number of lives we are capable of living is limited only by the number of books we choose to read.

We were married in August. We waited until after Zachary’s wedding was over, then snuck off to the courthouse like a pair of young lovers. Forty-three years later than we planned, but we finally made it. I