During lockdown they sprung up everywhere: outside houses, ranging along low walls, balanced precariously atop gate posts. Some were accompanied by handwritten notes saying “help yourself!” Others were sprawled as though abandoned mid-sort. Everyone was getting rid of books, and, in the absence of open charity shops, the unwanted contents of their shelves were free for the taking.
I came to appreciate these stacks on my daily walks. There was something enjoyable in the occasional glimpse of piled spines while wandering down favourite routes and exploring unfamiliar streets. Something revelatory, too. Among the assorted nutritional guides and thrillers, I found reading material I would never have thought to buy—texts on film and phenomenology, say, or Scottish architecture—and several books I’d been meaning to obtain—thanks to whoever left out Philippe Sands’s East West Street on a grey May morning when everyone’s front gardens were teeming with roses.
It wasn’t just what I took, though. It was also about what those stacks gave away. I began to treat the piles like clues, imagining the lives of the people who’d left them there. What had happened in the home now getting rid of multiple teach-yourself-Italian textbooks? Had whoever bought them intended to learn for a partner, a family connection, or simply for the singular pleasure of acquiring a new language? And did they achieve fluency, let it lapse, or give up in a fit of pique? Similarly, what had spurred the abandonment of a beautiful old lime green edition of The Crucible and an ugly modern copy of Dr Faustus? Was it someone done with drama or, more likely, had they belonged to a recently finished A-level student desperate to banish these much-revised texts from sight?
I continued to sleuth, never quite arriving at any definitive answers. Whole lives could be conjured from a cursory glance. There was no way of knowing who these books had belonged to, or how these piles formed composite reflections of my neighbour’s households. I wondered whether the texts scattered across a pavement several streets away, devoted to an intriguing array of topics including tarot cards and trade union history, had been a single collection or a shared assortment. But whatever connections might be drawn or speculations made, the details these books betrayed of their former owners were partial: welcoming guesswork, ultimately remaining unknowable.
*** Just after lockdown lifted, I came into possession of a large number of books. They arrived along with my mum, who I hadn’t seen in months. Her car was piled high with cardboard boxes. These contained the cherry-picked remnants of my paternal grandmother’s bookshelves. A Czech refugee who had to leave school at fourteen and later became an actress, my grandma had always been avid for knowledge. She read constantly and did two Open University degrees in her fifties: one in art history, the other in psychology. Her home was testament both to these studies and her wider interests, full of books on Picasso, the Pre-Raphaelites, Jung, and an awful lot of Iris Murdoch.
I had chosen what I wanted myself from this collection last year, back at the point when we knew my grandma wasn’t going to be returning from her nursing home. Facing down her books was a strange and intimate task. There was plenty of guesswork and revelation: this time I was not a stranger, wildly speculating about another stranger’s rejected belongings, but rather a granddaughter reckoning with her grandmother’s complex life. Several clues could be found. I saw in the texts on Narcotics Anonymous and Al-Anon the journeys she took with both of her sons and their addictions, and felt in the guidebooks to grief the pain of my uncle’s Aids-related death in the early nineties. I admired in the vast assortment of poetry and essays her appreciation of the English language (one of the five or so languages she spoke). I half-smirked, half-nodded with approval at the healthy amount of erotica she owned. I recognised in the number of histories of Nazi occupation and photography tomes devoted to Prague how she clung to every aspect of her history and homeland.
When I saw my mum, even though I couldn’t hug her, I felt grateful both for her presence and cargo. Those boxes, which I have only finished sorting recently, contained a beautiful, somewhat redeeming reflection of a woman who adored learning and was as brilliant as she was difficult. I only saw my grandma annually while growing up, as she lived abroad for much of my childhood and adolescence. When she did visit, in intense bursts each spring, we had to recalibrate: my grandma trying to acclimatise to the changes that had taken place in her absence. Reading was safe and rather lively shared ground though. Often the gifts she brought were books.
I find now, with her books mingled through mine, that they don’t just enhance my understanding of her. Rather, they complicate it, offering insights into small, remarkable facets of taste and temperament, providing additional layers to someone who could sometimes be a challenge. This knowledge expands each time I open another book and find some trace of my grandma tucked among the pages: in carefully underlined sentences and pencilled comments; in lists specifying “defrost dinner, make strudel dough” used as bookmarks; in the rustle of old literary reviews and news headlines kept for reference (last week I discovered two different obituaries of Ingrid Bergman stowed inside her memoir My Story.)
*** Over the weekend I put my own box of books onto the street. I felt oddly anxious in the process of doing so, shaking the pages to make sure there were no stray notes or receipts that might divulge something of myself. I wondered why I cared, or what I thought could be inadvertently revealed. Once they were out, though, worry turned into excitement. I had to stop myself from peeking from the front window too frequently, desperate to see what had disappeared.
At the time of writing, about half the books have gone. I find myself speculating, this time in reverse, about whose hands these books have passed into, wanting to see who they are and what they chose. I wonder, too, whether anyone has formed their own judgments of me while perusing that box’s contents. It’s funny. For all my contemplation of the lives of others, I’m not sure what could be gleaned from my own literary leftovers. Everything in there was something I had no use for: underwhelming novels, half-finished memoirs, young adult fiction I was never going to read. They don’t say anything about me beyond what I found disappointing. I suppose that’s as accurate a portrait as anyone else’s though. After all, it’s up to those raking through to decide what they wish to make of it.
