Grandpa’s Library

by

Paul Clark

This is a story about a book found, lost, found again, misplaced, found, and then “discovered.”

When I was growing up, on Sundays, after church and before lunch, my family visited my Dad’s dad, who lived a few blocks away from us. I remember my grandfather only as an old man so these Sunday visits were sedate affairs. In the first few years that I can remember, my grandfather would greet us in his living room, sitting in his rocking chair. He would take turns giving rides on his knees to whichever of my brothers and sisters were still small enough to fit. He had a little rhyme that he said as he bounced his grandchildren—I have the vaguest memory of him reciting it, a stronger memory of my dad repeating it in later years when we tried to remember this bouncy ditty.

After spending time with him, the kids were free to do whatever we wanted, which, in a house with an 80-year-old man, his 40-something unmarried daughter, and a live-in maid, was not much. There was a grand pool table in the basement with woven leather pockets, and a player piano that had seen better days. We couldn’t really play anyway without an adult nearby, and they were all upstairs talking.

In the attic, there were one or two toys left over from my dad’s childhood that were fun for a while. There also were many quiet games of hide and seek that spanned all levels of the house.

At eight or nine years old, I became more fascinated with my grandfather’s small library on the first floor. It had bookcases on two sides and windows that faced north. There was a chair and a small side table. In my imagination, the books towered above me on their shelves, but, of course, I was a small child so lots of thing towered above me. The books themselves were way above me. I do remember pulling some of them off the shelf and paging through them but, like Alice, losing interest because there were no pictures.

There was one book for kids, a picture book from a Disney cartoon, the one where Donald Duck gets a penguin delivered to him. I have that book now, somewhere in my attic with all of my kids’ books.

There was another fearsome-looking book. It was in a boxed set of three volumes sitting on a top shelf. What I remember from that book was a wide, terror-filled eye on the spine. That image simultaneously scared and attracted me, and it wasn’t until some years later, when my grandfather died and that boxed set ended up on one of my parents’ bookshelves, that I was able to pull the book out of its case to see what the whole image was.

But there was a third book on the shelf that ultimately became the one book that made me look forward to these visits to grandpa—The Second Fireside Book of Baseball (Simon and Schuster, 1958) edited by Charles Einstein. Einstein was a long-time sportswriter and mystery writer (and the half-brother of actor/comedian Albert Brooks) who died just last year. In the 1960s, of course, none of that meant anything to me. All I cared was that in this room full of books that I couldn’t understand here was one book filled with pictures of baseball players in action, most of whom had long since died or retired.

In addition, to the pictures, there were cartoons like “Dennis the Menace” and “Pogo” and cartoons from the New Yorker, all with baseball themes. There were many stories of old-time ball players and famous games and poetry and short stories. I reveled in the stories of players and games and mainly skipped the stories and poetry. There was even a baseball game you played with dice; I remembered to bring dice with me each week when we went visiting.

When my grandpa died, my dad took little from his childhood house (we already had a very full house). The player piano was beyond repair. The pool table was too big to consider moving. He took only a few books—the aforementioned “Donald’s Penguin” and the boxed set with the fearsome-looking horse’s eye are the only ones I remember on my parents’ shelves. The baseball book was not one of them.

It remained just a memory until a few years ago when I found a copy at a library book sale, in a pile of free books that were one step away from being discarded. A library copy, it was battered but instantly recognizable. I took it home, and spent an enjoyable afternoon looking at well-remembered pictures and cartoons, then put the book on a shelf. It migrated around the house for a few years as bookshelves were reorganized, books given away or otherwise boxed up.

I found it the other day, at the tail end of this Midwest winter that never seems to end, in a most inauspicious place for a book—underneath the back porch, lying on the top of a box of “stuff” (no better word for it) headed for the garbage. It had laid there all winter, protected from the snows but not the extreme temperatures.

I rescued it once again and, for the first time in my long acquaintance with this book, I took a closer look at the names on the cover. Yes, there are a lot of old-time sportswriters’ names here, but there also are these names—Sherwood Anderson; Jacques Barzun; Bennett Cerf; Finley Peter Dunne; James T. Farrell; Mark Harris; Shirley Jackson; Ring Lardner; Bernard Malamud; Marianne Moore; Kenneth Patchen; Robert Penn Warren. Writers famous for other reasons, but who all shared a passion for this sport of boys played by men in the summertime.

(The pages with the baseball dice game, however, had been cut out of the book, so that remains just a memory.) Although the temperature remains below freezing, and my interest in the current state of baseball has waned in recent years, my passion for the sport of my childhood remains, much of it bound in the covers of this book.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it