Open Bookcases

Guest Blogger Dept.: We return, as always we should, to Robert Benchley, whose essays expanded on a tradition of self-deprecating humor found in the delightful blusterings of Mark Twain, while tempering the very American art of exaggeration by humanizing the fantastic. Here’s a good example, examining a problem of admirable insignificance.

                                                                                                

THINGS HAVE COME to a pretty pass when a man can’t buy a bookcase that hasn’t got glass doors on it. What are we becoming – a nation of weaklings?

I thank them and walk into the
nearest dining-room table.
Drawing by Gluyas Williams.

All over New York city I have been trying to get something in which to keep books. And what am I shown? Curio cabinets, inclosed whatnots, museum cases in which to display fragments from the neolithic age, and glass-faced sarcophagi for dead butterflies.

“But I am apt to use my books at any time,” I explain to the salesman. “I never can tell when it is coming on me. And when I want a book I want it quickly. I don’t want to have to send down to the office for the key, and I don’t want to have to manipulate any trick ball-bearings and open up a case as if I were getting cream-puffs out for a customer. I want a bookcase for books and not books for a bookcase.”

(I really don’t say all those clever things to the clerk. It took me quite a while to think them up. What I really say is, timidly, “Haven’t you any bookcases without glass doors?” and when they say “No,” I thank them and walk into the nearest dining-room table.)

But if they keep on getting arrogant about it I shall speak up to them one of these fine days. When I ask for an open-faced bookcase they look with a scornful smile across the salesroom toward the mahogany four-posters and say:

“Oh, no, we don’t carry those any more. We don’t have any call for them. Every one uses the glass-doored ones now. They keep the books much cleaner.”

Then the ideal procedure for a real book-lover would be to keep his books in the original box, snugly packed in excelsior, with the lid nailed down. Then they would be nice and clean. And the sun couldn’t get at them and ruin the bindings. Faugh! (Try saying that. It doesn’t work out at all as you think it’s going to. And it makes you feel very silly for having tried it.)

Why, in the elder days bookcases with glass doors were owned only by people who filled them with ten volumes of a pictorial history of the Civil War (including some swell steel engravings), Walks and Talks with John L. Stoddard and Daily Thoughts for Daily Needs, done in robin’s-egg blue with a watered silk bookmark dangling out. A set of Sir Walter Scott always helps fill out a bookcase with glass doors. It looks well from the front and shows that you know good literature when you see it. And you don’t have to keep opening and shutting the doors to get it out, for you never want to get it out.

A bookcase with glass doors used to be a sign that somewhere in the room there was a crayon portrait of Father when he was a young man, with a real piece of glass stuck on the portrait to represent a diamond stud.

And now we are told that “everyone buys bookcases with glass doors; we have no call for others.” Soon we shall be told that the thing to do is to buy the false backs of bindings, such as they have in stage libraries, to string across behind the glass. It will keep us from reading too much, and then, too, no one will want to borrow our books.

But one clerk told me the truth. And I am just fearless enough to tell it here. I know that it will kill my chances for the Presidency, but I cannot stop to think of that.

After advising me to have a carpenter build me the kind of bookcase I wanted, and after I had told him that I had my name in for a carpenter but wasn’t due to get him until late in the fall, as he was waiting for prices to go higher before taking the job on, the clerk said:

“That’s it. It’s the price. You see the furniture manufacturers can make much more money out of a bookcase with glass doors than they can without. When by hanging glass doors on a piece of furniture at but little more expense to themselves they can get a much bigger profit, what’s the sense in making them without glass doors? They have just stopped making them, that’s all.”

So you see the American people are being practically forced into buying glass doors whether they want them or not. Is that right? Is it fair? Where is our personal liberty going to? What is becoming of our traditional American institutions?

I don’t know.

–Collected in Love Conquers All, Henry Holt & Co., NY, 1922