Ditching Friends at the Fair

Three Summer activities unite almost all New Englanders: following the Boston Red Sox, eating ice cream at the local dairy bar, and going to the annual town fair. I love the first two but dread the third.

I dread the town fair because … well, perhaps you’ll understand why if I tell you what my wife, Gail, said to me a few days ago: “Next week I want us to donate 500 books from our library to the used-book sale at the fair. So you might want to go through your books and pick out what you don’t think you’ll need anymore.”

If you love your books as much as I do, you understand how impossible it is to imagine any book in your library that you’ll not need anymore. Even lending a book to a friend is a personal crisis for me. It tests my Christian generosity. I want to encase a loaned book in something similar to what the banks use when they surrender money to a bank robber–something that explodes with indelible ink if the book is not returned in a week.

Gail raises this book-donation idea about this time every year, and she always increases the culling number. It started at 25 books a decade ago, and now has reached 500. I don’t know if this number is thoughtfully calculated, or it simply comes off the top of her head. But it always increases. It never, like John the Baptist, decreases.

I usually protest, but Gail is experienced in the discipline of downsizing. All she has to say is, “Okay, I’ll do it.” The thought of Gail choosing which of my books are going one-way to the fair is really not thinkable.

Some of you will understand when I say that each of my books is precious to me. When I am among them, I feel as if I’m wrapped in a warm blanket. Like a protective shepherd, I know my sheep (or books) by name. I know where almost every book is located on the shelves. The logic of their placement may defy you. But I know my books!

Gail used to tell our children when they were small, “Books are our friends.” I remind her of this when she sets the annual downsizing quota. I say, “Have you become so calloused that you’re ready to throw our ‘friends’ away?”

My question never dissuades her.

The minute I donate even one of my books to the town fair, I find that, within two weeks, I need something from it: a quote, for example, or a story. I may have not cracked that particular book once in ten years. But be assured that I will need that book within two weeks of its sacrifice.

Once or twice I’ve parted company with a book and then had to re-purchase another copy of that book online a few months later. Once I saw a former book of mine on the used-book table and felt so badly that I bought it back. But I never told Gail that I did this.

The used-book table ranks as one of the most popular aspects of our town fair. People, like myself, swarm over the donated books (a dollar each, three books for $2) seeking that bargain of a lifetime. Everyone fantasizes about discovering something that has been secreted away in someone’s attic for generations and is now worth thousands of dollars. A Gutenberg Bible, perhaps, or a first edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, or a book that was once a part of George Washington’s personal library and bears his signature.

Here’s a question: What would Jesus do if he knew a book was worth $25,000 but purchasable at the town fair for a buck? On second thought, I don’t want to know. He did tell a story about purchasing a field containing valuable hidden treasure.

Once at the town fair I found Spiro Agnew’s autobiography with his autograph in it. It was reduced from a dollar to fifty cents because the fair was closing down and it was about to rain. I’ve held on to it for several years waiting for someone on Ebay who might give me $75 for it, but so far I’ve gotten nary a nibble. Spiro may go back to the book table this year.

Almost every year when I’m scouring the used-book table, I spot a gaggle of books with familiar Christian-author names, which indicates that some local pastor also has a spouse who mandated a literary downsizing. You find books from out of the Christian past written by people like Ironside, Fosdick, and Peale. Or that reflect more recent fads written by Hal Lindsey, Bishop Pike, and Harold Lindsell. You can almost read the mind (and feel the pain) as the book-donator made “keep” or “discard” decisions.

It’s fun to thumb through books on the used-book table if you know them well. You look for what a previous owner underlined or scribbled in the margins. Occasionally I’ve felt embarrassed as if I’d just rummaged through someone’s dresser drawers.

On a more serious level, at times I’ve found a bunch of books that any Christian communicator would consider valuable. They must be there, I think to myself, because the original book-owner has quit or failed at what he or she has been doing and just wants those books—which at one time were so precious—out of sight.

If you’re an author like me, you move about the used-book table fearing that you will come across a book that you have written. When that happens, the message you discern is that someone no longer feels that what you had to say was worth preserving. Admittedly, it’s a pretty irrational conclusion, but authors can be strange people.

I am presently working on a new book project, and so I am fresh with thoughts about how a writer pours him or herself into every page of a manuscript. Just as a young mother is desperate to know that everybody thinks her baby is the most beautiful child in the world, an author dreams that everyone will think that this new book is the book above all books.

In a flush of irrationality, the author dares to imagine that, for hundreds of years, people will point to this book-in-the-making as the most significant piece of writing in literary history, rivaling Augustine’s Confessions or Pilgrim’s Progress or Mere Christianity. We’re imagining a book so valuable that those who purchase it will insure it against theft and lock it safely in a glass-doored, burglar-alarmed book cabinet.

My book, an author muses, will never see the used-book table at the town fair no matter what a spouse, bent on down-sizing, says.

Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership and lives in New Hampshire.