At Random for October 16, 2009
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I wasn’t having a good day. There had been phone tag for hours with various people, with nothing of consequence getting done. I’d gotten caught in an afternoon rain without my umbrella, arriving home to find a leak in the skylight.
But the evening mail brought a bright spot: a manila envelope containing a National Geographic issue from 1977.
My friend Perry Snyder had come across it while clearing out his mother’s house, and he thought a history article inside its pages might prove of particular interest.
It did, and I was touched that he’d taken the time to rescue the old magazine from obscurity and pass it along to someone who’d regard it as treasure, not trash.
Snyder said he was inspired to send along the magazine after remembering something that author and journalist Edwin Newman said years ago when he spoke at LaGrange College: “Books should have lives of their own. They should have the chance to travel from the hands of one grateful reader to those of another.”
“I’ve tried to practice what he preached that spring day,” Snyder added. “Though National Geographics aren’t books, I believe Mr. Newman will agree that certain issues need to find their way into the hands of those who will enjoy them.”
Snyder’s gesture reminded me of something that author Scott Russell Sanders did recently when he retired from the Department of English at Indiana University at Bloomington.
Sanders, one of America’s best writers on the natural world, had accumulated a sizeable library of good books in his faculty office. Upon his retirement, he sent a message to students: They were free to come and pick out some books they might like.
An easier path, you might guess, than packing all that stuff in boxes and bringing it home. But these were texts that had really meant something to Sanders — and that he thought might mean something to a new generation of readers, too. Sanders’ quiet gesture, done without fanfare, was much in keeping with the low-key generosity of the man himself.
It was also in keeping with Newman’s admonition that books should have lives of their own — that they should be out in the world, shaking hands with multiple minds, not selfishly hoarded on a shelf. I tend to keep books and magazines around because I think I’ll need them later. But maybe Newman was on to something — that the printed word is meant to be passed around, so that its ideas can be planted far and wide.
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