The Box of Books My Mother Sent Me
by
Nicki LeoneIt looked, at first glance, like an ordinary box filled with a half dozen books—some new looking, some quite clearly bearing the small dings and scratches that come from a long existence on somebody’s bookshelf. It was an eclectic collection of titles:
This particular box sitting on my library table is a retaliation of sorts. For her birthday this spring, and after a brief talk about how much she had liked the television miniseries on John Adams, I sent mom what I laughingly called her “founding fathers library”—biographies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Franklin. “Your summer reading,” I wrote on the card, knowing that five dense biographies would take even her awhile to get through. So eventually, a propos of nothing, I received my own box, this one with its odd assortment of titles. Not to mark any special occasion—no birthday or holiday to serve as an excuse—these were just simply books my mother wanted me to read. And yet, as I pulled them out and looked at them one by one, I realized suddenly that they were more than just a bunch of books. They were . . . mementos, I suppose. I am a dutiful daughter. I call my parents at least once a week just to talk and catch up. If I reach my dad we talk tech, computers, work and, depending on the season, what mom has him doing in the garden. If I reach my mom, we talk cooking, gardening, family news, plays and exhibits she and dad have seen, and what she has them doing in the garden. And we talk books. Looking at my box, I realized I was looking at the evidence of several months’ worth of phone conversations with my mother. On Birds The book on Lucy Audubon was the least surprising item in the box. I come from a family of environmentalists, scientists, and birders. I actually have my grandparents’ Audubon print American Bitterns hanging on my living room wall, thanks to a collaborative effort of my mother and me. (I did the work of finding someone to asses and restore the print, she paid for it.) Mom had been reading Lucy Audubon: A Biography—an account of the fascinating John James Audubon’s equally fascinating wife—about the same time as I was reading a novel of ornithologists called In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld. For quite a few weeks our phone conversations were about birds and field notebooks and the challenges of drawing from real life. Both mom and I keep sketchbooks and pencils that we don’t use nearly as often as we’d like to. On Books in Translation That The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker was included was evidence of how simpatico mom and I are in our literary inclinations, even when we aren’t trying to be. She told me about finding the book and picking it up because of the unusual size (it was almost square) and because of the subject—about a man forced to return home to the family farm when his twin brother is killed in an accident. Mom likes novels about people and their relationship to the land. This story, about a man who must come to terms with a life he never planned on living and how he learns to make it his own, is exactly the sort of thing both she and I would like. But as she was talking about it, I had perked up and was scrolling through my own “wish list” of books. “It was square?” I asked. “Foreign author?” Mom said yes, a Dutch writer she never heard of. It just so happened that a large part of my reading that moment was dominated by the Three Percent Best Translated Books of 2008 (long list), and I had discovered the publisher Archipelago Books, which specializes in bringing high quality foreign fiction into English. Most of their books have a distinctive square format. I told mom I knew the publisher, and was in fact reading some other books they had done—Yalo by Elias Khoury and The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre. Mom hadn’t realized that one of the leading publishers for books in translation was in her own town of Rochester, NY, and the “Three Percent” blog that had done such a number on my pocketbook with its recommended long list was a product of the University of Rochester. The name, I told her, comes from the estimate that less than three percent of the books published in the United States were originally written in a language other than English. Illustrations Mom and I found another accidental connection in the subject of Rudolph II of Austria—a contemporary of Elizabeth I whose reign is generally considered to have been a political disaster but a triumph of intellectual, artistic, and scientific endeavor. He is a private fascination of mine, one I don’t think has ever really come up in conversation with my mother or anyone else, so hearing his name suddenly in the course of a discussion about botanical illustration was a bit of a shock. Mom and her best friend, it turned out, had attended an exhibition of Joris Hoefnagel—who happened to be Rudolph’s court illuminator and famous for many things, one of which was his flora and fauna illustrations of a book called the Mira calligraphiae monumenta (the Model Book of Calligraphy). The book had been created by the master calligrapher Georg Bocskay during the reign of Rudolph’s grandfather, Frederick I, and it was—possibly still is—the most elaborate work of its kind. Fifteen years after Bocskay died, Rudolph II commissioned Hoefnagel to “fill in the spaces” as it were—to illustrate the book of elaborate lettering and script with equally elaborate images from the Holy Roman Emperor’s own extensive collection and menagerie. The result is both compelling and slightly odd, because the spaces Hoefnagel had to work with were often irregularly shaped, and he was sometimes obliged to bend and contort species to fit the space they were allowed to occupy. Rather like Audubon, who famously drew his flamingos and blue herons in unlikely positions to retain their life-size proportions while still fitting within the bounds of the largest size of paper he could use. Unlike Audubon, who was careful to picture his birds with the plants and habitat peculiar to their species, Hoefnagel seemed more concerned with filling space, so a bewildering and sometimes alarming array of creatures and plants crowd the page in what surely must be the apex of the tradition of old medieval herbals. My mother’s friend gave mom a small book from the J. Paul Getty museum on the work of Hoefnagel, Nature Illuminated: Flora and Fauna from the Court of the Emperor Rudolf II. On a piece of note paper (showing a cartoon woman catching her husband’s golf ball “before it got lost in the hole”) she stuck in the front she wrote “Happy Birthday, this book is in place of a card.” Mom evidently poured over the small volume for awhile—her birthday was quite a few months ago—before including it in the box that came to me. Mom’s comment was simply “you’ll like this.” On Style Under the small book of botanical illustrations and calligraphy was another illustrated book, in its own way equally illuminating: The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White, illustrated by Maira Kalman. This book was the product of another exhibition visit—one of Kalman’s work. The illustrator is a well known children’s book artist and her work has been on more than a few New Yorker covers. But the project to illustrate The Elements of Style was a kind of personal journey of discovery for her. Her own visual response to the rules of good writing that have guided most of us for nearly a hundred years. Mom actually bought the book at the exhibition specifically for me, because she knows I am interested when people have such personal reactions to books. And it is a charming, idiosyncratic edition. I especially like how the end paper on the front cover of the jacketless book says “hello” while the one on the back cover says “goodbye.” But what was most startling about the book, and mom’s interest in both it and the exhibition was this: she had never read and never used The Elements of Style. “You’re kidding!” I exclaimed when it came up on the phone. “I must be on my fourth copy of that book.” Which is true—I have had a cheap battered copy of Strunk and White near to hand pretty much ever since I came to college. I no more questioned its existence as a necessity on my desk than I did my Roget’s or my copy of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. These were simply things you had to have around to write well. “How did you get through school without ever having a copy?” I asked her with complete seriousness. Mom allowed that she didn’t know—she had a different style book for her classes and like me, took to keeping a copy with her for years and years. So she never felt the need to use Strunk and White, which to be fair didn’t become so universally popular until sometime in the fifties, after she was out of school. I was still floored, though. The Elements of Style is as basic a foundation for my own literary style as the primary colors are to an artist’s palette. Mom and I communicate so well, and are in such fine agreement as to what good writing should be, I find it hard to fathom we come from two different schools of compositional style. In her next box, I’m sending her my copy of Strunk and White. Or at least, one of my copies. On Family Mysteries The last two books in the box were the most mysterious—to both my mother and me. A large version of the Rubaiyat illustrated with reproductions of Persian miniatures, and book of paintings from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. These books belonged to my grandmother (on my father’s side)—who is now ninety-eight and suffering from dementia. But Grandma never was a reader, and as far as we know never went to either the Middle East or to Italy, and certainly never read poetry of any kind, much less poetry by a Persian mystic. Yet there were these books in one of her dresser drawers, things she kept with her through numerous moves from house to house to assisted living center to nursing home. Why? My entire life I never remember Grandma reading anything other than a newspaper. I never once saw her with a book. And although she traveled when she was younger, she tended to bring back jewelry and curios as mementos of her trips, not books. She had a few landscape paintings on her walls, but nothing that ever suggested an interest beyond a simple appreciation for a pretty picture. (She also had a large picture of clowns over her fireplace that I hope has been dispensed with, and a plethora of Victorian-style figurines of cherubs and angels in her bathroom.) And yet here were these books on the art of Persia, and the art of the Renaissance. Why? Between the pages of each were newspaper clippings of various art exhibitions in Detroit, where she lived most of her life. Again, why? She never said she liked art. She never talked about it or seemed interested in it and she certainly never suggested we take a trip to the Detroit Institute of Art (the DIA) during family visits. Yet here these books are, when most of the rest of the material evidence of her life has been dispersed or sold off. Were these books just left over? Did they survive simply because no one ever bothered to do anything about them? Or were they important? I find myself wondering what I missed over all those years, during all those family visits. Mom thinks perhaps they were gifts from friends, and Grandma kept the books as much because of the gift than because she liked to read them. Perhaps so—the Rubaiyat, anyway, seems to be a companion to a couple of Persian miniature paintings Grandma owned that no one could ever really explain. But mom’s theory doesn’t quite account for the carefully clipped newspaper articles folded and stored within the pages of Great Museums of the World: The Uffizi. To both my mother and myself, it seems like there is something missing there, something we don’t know, something private to Grandma. And we are left with just the evidence of its existence hinted in a few unlikely books and yellowed newspapers. So that is what was in the box of books my mother sent me. Not just a box of books, but a touchstone to a series of shared experiences and conversations. The stories in the books are almost secondary to the stories of the books. I find myself unable to put them away—to put the art books with my art books, or the Elements of Style over with my reference and style books. No, I feel compelled to keep these six books together. They seem to belong together—a special section in my library called “books from my mother.” And so they remain stacked on my library table where they are a constant reminder and constant evidence of the way my mother and I speak to each other. Books mentioned (or otherwise hinted at) in this column: His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis (Knopf, 2008) John Adams by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster, 2001) American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph J. Ellis (Random House, 1996) Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (Penguin, 2004) Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson (Simon and Schuster, 2003) Lucy Audubon: A Biography , updated edition by Carolyn E, DeLatte (LSU, 2008) In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld (Unbridled Books, 2008) The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker (Archipelago Books, 2009) Nature Illuminated: Flora and Fauna from the Court of Rudolph II by Lee Hendrix and Thea Vignau-Wilberg (J. Paul Getty, 1997) Rudolph II and Prague: The Court and the City edited by Eliska Fucikova (Thames and Hudson, 1997) The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, illustrated by Maira Kalman (Penguin Press, 2005) The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Persian Miniatures translated by Edward Fitzgerald (Miller Graphics, 1979) Uffizi Florence: Great Museums of the World edited by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (Newsweek, Inc. & Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1968) Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.
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