First Editions

He is in his late 70's, a short, chubby man with a badly bent back. He walks with a cane, taking small, shuffling steps and often having to over correct for his body's inclination to lean left. He has cancer, heart problems, pulmonary disease, is diabetic and arthritic - his body is failing him but his mind is sharp and he still never fails to arrive without a smile. And he brings me books, small gifts from an extensive collection that he is slowly but surely passing on to others. He reads everything, he tells me proudly, fiction and history, biographies and crime stories, but like me, he has a special love for horror - there is almost always a Stephen King in the recycled bag he carries - and he still has enough of a pension left to be able to get to Barnes & Noble when the latest King novel arrives. This day he brings me a slim, hardbound, first edition of an early work in mint condition and will not hear a word of protest about my accepting it.

Books have become his travel, his work, his escape, his family. Personal experience tells me that dedicated readers are often hard pressed to part with any book, favorite or not, but he gives freely, leaving them in hospital rooms and doctors offices, donating to the homeless shelters and halfway houses and soup kitchens. There is special magic in books, he tells me, they stir the imagination and wake up the senses, rouse our curiosity and polish our language. You're never too old or frail to learn or unlock your mind, he says with a smile, Books are the best possible companions. In fact, at my age, they're the only companions.

I hoped this wasn't true for this tidy little man. He settled himself in a chair, adjusted his glasses, and pulled the inevitable paperback from a back pocket, "The Taking" by Dean Koontz, something I had read just the week before.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book? ~Marina Tsvetaeva