Books and Barns: A Paean

The Book Barn is the place to be. Situated on the Connecticut shoreline, it is a store, hobby farm, and booming antiquarian book business all rolled into one cat fur-lined ball.

The Book Barn is, literally, a farmhouse with adjoining barns and book stalls all over the acre it sits on. There are cats lying, sitting, and walking around in every structure. During the summers pygmy goats laze in a pen next to the house. All year round about twenty barn cats roam from barn to barn. In the farmhouse there’s always free coffee and tiny powdered sugar donuts. It’s been a sanctuary for me for the past ten years. I have spent time there searching for books on my school reading lists and syllabi, for spirituality texts, for out-of-print fairy tale and folklore anthologies, for stuff to read on airplanes, for indie comics. I have sat for whole afternoons in the chilly attic, sharing a broken down couch with a barn cat, reading through books I’d never heard of like J.P. Donleavy’s The Unexpurgated Code, Kate Millett’s Sita, and Peter DeVries’ The Blood of the Lamb.

An education to be sure.

For the first few years, I brought my Milton professor from the University of Connecticut down with me. He was semi-retired and glad to get off campus and down to the shore. We visited the Barn for a couple hours, then sat in a Greek restaurant looking out over the Long Island Sound and talked about what we’d bought. Poetry and actors’ memoirs for him, and folklore for me. We’d go every six months or so. Later I went on my own more frequently, or brought friends with me. Sometimes I’d go twice a month–there’s an allure to the tiny place with it’s perfect situation near the ocean and the cute Scottish pub and the palm-reading shop next door.

-Jg6RSRBf_P-g6gvsl77Ls6r9ApbAbmMEKAqJDE8YjkOne of the best things about the Book Barn is that you can sell your books back to them. For every book I sold, they gave me either a little cash or store credit. There were flush seasons for me in which I’d buy thirty books at a time. There were other times when I had to move and couldn’t deal with the overwhelming library I’d amassed, so I performed a triage of sorts on my books and sold a box or two back. This worked so well that one summer about four years ago, I decided to sell my Baby-Sitters Club collection, all three hundred books.

I drove down to the shore and pulled the box out of my trunk and took my place in line. Many people came to sell on weekends and as was common, the line wound back in the parking lot. When it was my turn, I shoved my box onto the counter and stood back smiling at the owner, Randy. He knows me pretty well by now, I thought. He’ll probably give me fifty bucks for this! Randy frowned and called over one of his assistants. My heart sank. It was one of the savvy book-buyers, one I sometimes asked for recommendations. She peered into the box and shook her head.

“We have so much Baby Sitters Club already,” she said.

“But, everyone loves the Baby Sitters Club!” I said, winking. “I mean, who doesn’t love baby-sitting stories steeped in moral values from the eighties?”

She laughed. “I do. But we can’t even sell the ones we have.” She paused. “There’s a charity book drop at the children’s museum down the street. I don’t think there’s any resale value on these things.”

I sighed and turned away. But since I was there, and the day was sunny and warm, I threw the box in the back of my car and skipped back up the path to the house. Treacly baby-sitting fiction be damned, I was in my favorite place! Later that day I did throw the entire box into the charity book drop–there was no way I was bringing three hundred books back home.

I found a dog-eared first print copy of John Knowles’ A Separate Peace and a dollar paperback of The Light Princess and Other Tales.

“Score!” I said gleefully to a passing tabby. She stared at me for a moment as if to say, “Everyone scores here, it’s not that big of a deal,” and then she stalked away.

I went to another stall and skimmed through a Peanuts treasury. I squeezed past a father and son who were staring at a coffee table-sized golfing manual. Here’s a place, I thought—for the hundredth time, where anyone can find a book on anything that strikes their fancy.

I went to pay for my books and got in line at the register. I ate a powdered sugar donut and watched a family in line ahead of me. A preschool girl was showing her new (old) Lowly Worm book to her older sister. Both bent over it and grinned looking at the worm in the Tyrolean hat with his single boot on.

I smiled to myself. I was home. My tribe and my place, my coffee, cats, and books all around me.

 

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Elena bio YAH

All the Unavailable Lives

It was the smell of old paper. Of dust and must, history and mystery.6927396329_ec18eb6669_o

Where did these books come from? What journey had they been on to end up piled high on the table, just waiting for me to stop by on a Saturday morning and add them to my bag?

We wandered the tables, my dad and I, used books piled high. There was nothing like enduring to the end of the sale, claiming the prize of an all-you-can-fill bag for $2. The books we sought were the kind that you open and smell, inhaling the knowledge and wisdom resting in their dusty binding. They were books that, upon grabbing, you first turn to the front, looking for the published date, buying it if the year was before 1920, even if you had no intention of reading it. I loved the feel of the old cloth-bound covers. I grew up with my dad always asking ‘are your hands clean?’ before we touched the very new or very old books. Books were a treasure, a cheap vice, and we were rich.

There was nothing I liked better than curling up on the couch with my purchases. The out-of-print Landmark and Chimney RockSignature books were the most treasured. I learned about everything from my piles of pages. I know where the Catskill Mountains are and what spelunking is from Trixie Belden. Thanks to her, I still have an inexperienced fear of tight spaces in caves. I learned what Geiger counters were from the Hardy Boys, and I know ‘misle’ isn’t a word from Encyclopedia Brown.  I’ve loved pieces of furniture with secret spots and unfolding parts, ever since I first read about Jefferson’s writing desk. I crossed the ocean countless times with Pilgrim Stories, cheered the defeat of Custer, mourned the death of Pocahontas over and over again, and I still think Jo and Laurie should have gotten married.

As I aged, my tastes changed, and I read more mature works, even if they were beyond me. I read The Great Gatsby in high school and didn’t understand it. It took me 6 months to read Gone With The Wind, and I only read one chapter of Crime and Punishment in 8th grade before giving up. Yet, I kept trying. I read The Stranger in college, most of it going over my head, but relived my love of the prairie with O Pioneers. I constantly wanted to be exposed to new people, new ideas. I wanted to live all the lives unavailable to me.

Platte RiverMy love for reading meant I was present at so many historical events, and it’s utterly embarrassing how many of these events occurred under the category ‘Christian Historical Fiction’. The Battle of Shiloh with a side of Jesus, right down the fiction aisle, shelf ‘Morris’. But the Battle of Gettysburg was more impressive because I began when Abe was formed by splitting rails. I rode the length of the Pony Express. I traveled the Oregon Trail more times than I can count, not dying of dysentery once. I visited Fort Laramie and the Platte River as an adult and thanks to all of those prairie romances it was more than crumbling concrete and a calm, thin slice of water for me.

These are cornerstones of American mythology, and walking through the Oregon Trail cemetery on Rt. 92 reminded me that myth is rooted in fact. These people, their histories, and their experiences are all true even if learned about in fiction. They formed me as I grew.

Reading filled me with a sense of independence and grit. If kids can hide themselves in heavy kettles in King Phillip’s War, surely I can mop a floor without complaining. I remember saying things to myself like, “if Laura and Mary were here, what would they do?”. If Laura could clean the house and air out the tick mattresses while Ma was gone, then I could move a bookshelf by myself, hole in the plaster wall be damned. If people ask me to help them with something I think should be a solo job, I want to yell “if you lived on the prairie, you might not have anyone to help you!” But I resist the urge. Usually.

So, if you decide to stop by your annual book sale, and you grab a book off the table for a dime, just be aware that while you might think it’s just a book waiting to be discovered, it’s actually waiting to discover you.

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CarisProfile

A midwest native transplanted to Virginia, Caris Adel is passionate about justice and is continually looking for ways to disrupt her status quo. A homeschooling mom of five, she is also pursuing a bachelor’s degree in American Studies and Public History.

Book photo by Bernard Walker, Chimney Rock and Platte River photos by Caris Adel.