The Color of Books

I FELL IN LOVE with my wife when she walked into a room in the fall of 1989. It was a party thrown by a graduate student at the university where I was teaching as a post-doctoral fellow, and I was sitting on the floor playing Trivial Pursuit. The fact that I was sitting matters – I am significantly shorter than my wife, a fact which I managed to conceal when she came over and fortuitously sat down next to me to join our game. I remember we talked for a long time that night about the books we were reading and the books we hoped to write. It’s a conversation that has continued now for going on thirty-five years. Sometimes young people will ask me the secret of a long and happy marriage. I always say the same thing: a good marriage is not just like a good conversation, it simply is a good conversation. Our conversation started that night in 1989. It was not quite, but close, to being love at first sight. I saw her at the door and I must have lit up – I “hinked” as cops might say in crime novels – and the next thing I knew she was sitting beside me, and we started to talk. Essentially, she never got up.

I raise this personal story, not out of an autobiographical impulse – I’m secretly the most boring man in America, I like it that way, and I also like to keep my boring-ness private – but because that experience of “love at first sight,” is how I felt when I first saw a book from the New York Review of Books Classics. Like my marriage, it has been a long and happy love affair ever since.

The bookstore was Arcadia Books in Spring Green, Wisconsin. We have gone there every year for a decade or more on a pilgrimage of pretentiousness: the area is something of a Mecca for the arts. Outside of town to the south across the Wisconsin River is the Frank Lloyd Wright house called Taliesin. On the same south side of the river is the American Players Theater, which every summer puts on Shakespeare, Chekhov and other great plays in an outdoor theater located on top of a substantial hill, which you reach after a lovely, but increasingly taxing, walk through the woods. Every year we drive two and a half hours out to Spring Green from Milwaukee, eat dinner in town, usually at a nice restaurant inside an old bank building, visit the bookstore, then go out to the theatre on the hill.

On our first visit to Arcadia – the word connotes utopia of a particularly pastoral kind, an untrammeled wilderness – I fell in love. The book was Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861, edited by Damion Searls, who among other things that would make me want to like him is a translator of Rilke and Proust. Thoreau has always been one of my favorites: such a strange and courageous man, and such a crafter of sentences. His journal, like his masterpiece, Walden, is filled with sentences that probably only Thoreau could write. On Indians: “They seem to me a distinct and equally respectable people, born to wander and to hunt, and not to be inoculated with the twilight civilization of the white man.” On education: “It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.” On literature: “It is the untamed, uncivilized, free, and wild thinking in Hamlet, in the Iliad, and in all the scriptures and mythologies that delights us.” On the passage of time: “It is like the dreaming of frogs in a summer evening.” On drinking from a brook in the woods: “The man must not drink of the running streams, the living waters who is not prepared to have all nature reborn in him, -- to suckle monsters.” Great stuff.

But I must confess that it wasn’t the content of the book that caught and held me. It was its cover, its size, and, most importantly, its color.  The covers of NYRB Classics all have the title and author contained in a small rectangle two-thirds of the way up. The sizes of NYRB Classics are uniform – slightly bigger than a normal paperback, but not as big as hard cover books or trade paperbacks. And, most importantly, the spines of NYRB Classics are all solid colors. Navy blue, sky blue, turquoise. Purple, violet, magenta. Burgundy, maroon, carmine. Forest green, lime green, mint. Brown, beige, sand.  The designs are elegant, in the way that a theory in physics might be called elegant – all the pieces fit with a symmetry that makes you think that a higher intelligence might have had a hand in their creation.

Thoreau’s journals, as it happened, were sunflower yellow. A nice touch, seemingly – Thoreau is perhaps the sunniest of writers. But, as I look through my other NYRB Classics, I note that a delightful book of essays by the novelist and Sinologist, Simon Leys, called The Hall of Uselessness, is the same bright sunflower color. Slightly lighter, more of a flaxen shade of yellow, are The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam and Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays. So I discern no organizing principle in the choice of yellows.

Indeed, I can discern no organizing principle in the choice of any of the colors for the spines of the books. Alistair Horne’s shattering A Savage War of Peace, about the Algerian Civil War, is brown, but so is Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare. Walter Benjamin’s The Storyteller Essays is a rust color, but so are Nancy Mitford’s pop biography Frederick the Great and Cesare Pavese’s great short novel The Moon and the Bonfires. Oddly enough, William H. Gass’ strange and beautiful philosophical essay On Being Blue has a purple spine, while his great book of novellas, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, is, in fact, blue. Jean-Patrick Manchette’s ultra-noir crime novel, The Mad and the Bad, probably ought to be blood red, but the designer settled for burnt orange. You get the picture. No organizing principle and yet… I love the way they look all together on my shelf.

And, of course, the way they look has enticed me to read so many writers I never would have read or perhaps even known of – Manchette and Patrick Modiano, Walter Kempowski and Peter Handke, Pavese and Leonardo Sciascia. Finding new books is like finding new friends; your new connections tend to radiate outward to still more new friends, who take you to new places and show you new things.

I read somewhere in my younger days that a man, if he wants to be a “whole man,” ought to have, in addition to his other interests, something that he collects. Some men collect stamps, or rare coins; some men of more substantial means might collect vintage cars, or antiques, or paintings – I know a law professor who bought Roy Lichtensteins fifty years ago and now proudly displays his gold mine. I once imagined that I would collect first editions of my favorite books, and I managed to get a few – Wallace Stevens’ The Auroras of Autumn is probably my most valuable – although the prices for such things have outstripped my income and events – "events, dear boy, events!” – have intervened. Catholic schools. College tuitions. Daughters’ weddings. In the fullness of time I am firm in my belief that I’ve arranged my priorities correctly. God and Family come first. Still… I would have liked to have had a nicer book collection.

Late in the day, NYRB rode to my rescue. The uniform size and design of the classic books published by NYRB makes them ideal for collecting. And the colors transform the books into a beautifully decorative display in my home. Flanking my fireplace I have two bookcases, ebony, with cut glass panes in their doors. Inside one are the NYRB Classics I’ve purchased and read. Inside the other are the NYRB Classics I’ve purchased, but not yet read. In total I probably have a hundred and fifty, and NYRB keeps publishing more and more, perhaps as many as five hundred, perhaps a thousand. No matter. It’s a reading program for a lifetime. I’ll probably never finish reading them all before I die. It is an oddly happy thought, because then I’ll never run out of new things to be interested in.