Random Access

Random Access

I no longer keep shelves of prized books. Once they are read, most of my books are replaced on my limited shelf space by other books.

Every now and then my wife gathers up the books we have read, calls one or two of the grandchildren, and off we go to a secondhand bookstore.

There our old books are bought by the proprietor at a ridiculously low price. That amount (usually plus an extra allowance) my wife then assigns to the accompanying grandchildren for them to buy books for themselves at the store. They are voracious readers so they love those excursions. It’s very interesting observing them make decisions as they reconcile their desire for certain books with the limits of their budget.

After these trades the new books that have been lying around irritatingly (because, I confess, I tend to like things in their proper place) in various nooks and crannies around the house take their place on the bookshelves, more or less.

It’s at times like that that I appreciate the emphasis on memorization that characterized much of my generation’s education and the value placed on keeping books in as pristine a condition as reasonable. You never dog-eared a page to which you thought you would want to return.


There were no yellow Highlighters back then to mark passages for future reference. Notes in margins were frowned on, and reduced the value of your books, which were almost always sold at the end of term to finance secondhand books from the class ahead. “Open Book” tests were undreamed of and notes written on a book were considered an attempt to cheat.

The first thing one did on getting a new book was to make a dust jacket for it with newspaper, or, more prized, crisp, glossy, waxed brown paper that had been used to wrap some item from the cornerstore.

We were trained to carry around significant passages from our books in our heads. That approach has been banished from schools for several decades now, and certainly a diet of mostly rote learning is poor. However it developped a habit of and a capacity to stash away in one’s memory the most enjoyable or useful parts of any genre of book one read. These become closely integrated into one’s life, always ready to be recalled: the ultimate portable RAM.

Now, even though my wellworn but wellstocked memory sometimes isn’t always accurate or efficient, I can still access in my head many a beautiful, insightful, inspirational or useful reference from some book that is no longer available on my bookshelves.


My memory has outlived this failed harddrive by several decades.