In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis recollects his childhood surrounded by books. Like his parents, he became an obsessive reader. And where that led is well-known. I also am a product of books, parents who read, who read to me, and a person who from childhood, became an obsessive reader. This was a constant tension in my life as digital books were nonexistent and available Braille titles were unequal to my demand. The state had one library for the blind, and I received books one at a time in mailing containers at lengthy intervals. My childhood fantasy was to be in a vast library of shelves full of books that I could read myself. Reflection leads to this as the source of Living Books Library*,*** a collection of somewhere around twenty thousand books that fills the shelves of the lower level of my home today. It is full of all the books I loved as a child, and all those I would have loved if I could have read them all.

Naturally as a young mother I read continually to my children. I took them to the library, which was a little diminished from those I remembered from my childhood. Many great titles were there, but so many silly and second-rate selections had sifted in among them. My children loved books too, especially Emily who trotted to and from the neighborhood library with her little red wagon piled with treasure. Homeschooling led to Charlotte Mason,

which led to the discovery of living books instead of textbooks, which eventually led our family to Children’s Preservation Library in Cedar, Michigan. That was a dream come true for my children. Michelle Howard had collected the best literature for children, organized it for loaning to homeschooling families, and it provided abundant plunder, not to mention inspiration, for them until our family made a big move away to another state.

That is what returned me to the public library. We made a visit with high hopes and I came home in tears of despair. How could I provide rich resources to my children with that meager offering? Ironically, I now own as many titles as that little local library, but that is the happily ever after part of the tale. This experience was the motivation to start me on the quest to collect a library of my own. I knew my two hundred books would not be adequate.

I started by discovering the used bookstores in our area. My oldest daughter Emily would humor me by reading titles, but it was slow collecting. Then came one fateful library sale. My youngest daughter, who had been part of CPL, had an eye for “one of Michelle’s library kind.” I recollected owning Jan Bloom’s Who Should We Then Read? It contained 150 classic authors and lists of their books. Emily read that, found a few at our local Friends of the Library sale herself, read them, and was hooked. Soon we were haunting more bookstores, estate sales, flea markets, eBay. My husband’s new part-time job became building sturdy bookcases.

At first our challenge was finding the good old, mostly out-of-print titles, but it soon became finding space for them in our home. More crucially, if we were to make use of them, organization was imperative. I refused to have boxed up books, which I considered to be a recipe for not reading them. I had broad categories at first, obviously fiction and nonfiction, and within nonfiction history, poetry, literature, and biographies, but science challenged me. I read in someone’s book collecting advice to sort them by the days of creation. That soon proved to be cumbersome. Where were woodchucks? Should they not be near other rodents? Where should we put living books on molecules, or gravity, or bioethics? Clearly we needed a system.

A mile marker in the library journey occurred when we returned home one afternoon to find a mountain of boxes on the front porch—42 boxes. They were full of top-notch collectible books! Who had sent them? No return address. A mystery. A blessing.

Emily contacted Michelle back in Michigan to get ideas for a quick guide to the Dewey Decimal system. We found he had all the answers to where to put specific books, a genius categorical method. We soon became obsessed with how to label and repair and care for the treasure we found ourselves in possession of. Ironically, Emily was prepared for this work having spent two years of her work-study grant in college working in the library’s Tech Services. We thought of all of this as responsible stewardship of the gift of the books, but honestly, it was the most enjoyable hobby. Soon I had stacks of sorted books in orderly piles lining my walk-in closet, then lining the walls of my master bedroom. “We need more bookcases,” became the constant refrain.

Emily toiled for hours to enter each book into the database, label, and make them ready for those shelves. My conscience began to press me. (You can’t possibly read all the books you have gathered. What about your friends struggling to homeschool? Shouldn’t you love your neighbor as yourself?) I argued with that taunting voice. “Friends will not handle these books as they need to be if they are to survive. What if they abuse them, ruin them, or, worst of all: lose them? And, from a book read long ago, some words of Corrie Ten Boom immediately spoke back to me, her reprimand to a friend who was grieving over the shattering of a priceless porcelain vase, “Stop that right now. That vase does not have eternal life.” How could I deny others the life-giving power of living books?

So began the big debate about how and when and where to form a library. I had more reservations then. Our family lived on a shoestring budget (and even so, I spent precious grocery money to buy books if a gem came across my path!). I valued my clean and tidy home and the thought of many people, many children, tramping in and out of it was daunting. I comforted my doubts by supposing that not that many people would be interested. We decided to start small. But how? The CPL back in Michigan had a collection of plastic totes each containing one of the Five-in-a-Row titles accompanied by supplemental books to expand the themes of the title picture book. My preschooler had loved them. Not many in our area knew anything about homeschooling other than with box curriculum from the big homeschool companies. Perhaps offering these books would help families get a taste of what living books offered for educating children. It seemed manageable, except, we did not own many of the FIAR titles, much less all the helpful supplemental books.

The thought came to me out of the blue, What about Kim R. back in Michigan? She had started a library like Michelle’s, but had had to close early on. She had patiently read titles of books she was selling off over the phone to Emily. (Bear in mind, this was back before high-speed internet and Zoom meetings!) I wondered if she had any of the FIAR totes she had put together. I nervously called to broach the subject with her. I knew they were her treasure that she had never wanted to part with. When I tentatively asked if she might be willing to sell them, she was dead silent. (Oh no, I thought, I have offended her!) Finally, she spoke. “I cannot believe you are asking me this. I just sat down at my computer to type a list of all these books to put on eBay.” I gulped at the price she quoted and said I would get back to her as soon as possible. We had two of our children’s weddings coming in the next six months. Did I mention our tight budget? Where was I going to get the money? Considering all the work she had invested in collecting, her price was reasonable. We prayed. I had a beautiful guitar that was my pride and joy, but so little time to use it. If I could sell it, would it be worth it to have children grow up on all my beloved childhood reading?