Some books are like old friends, even if you haven't read them for years their presence still brings a lot of happiness. Holding these old books is to return to the past, when one was younger and enjoyed reading them for the first time; or just the physical presence of the book, the cover, the paper on which it is printed, the smell of the book that returns one to the past. Take, for instance, this Sherlock Holmes title, published in 1895, and inscribed "George Henry Donald with best wishes from G.C. Rankam 17/6/95"; I was afraid I'd given this book away when I reduced the number of books I wanted to keep; but here it was, among other books where it had been left, in a box. Another book, one that I taught, is The Great Gatsby (1925), teaching from this second hand copy, every page annotated, it is a book I still love; the carelessness of these people that Fitzgerald describes is more common than many of us are able to accept. I read Irving Stone's Lust for Life (1934), a biography of the artist Vincent van Gogh, when I was a teenager and later I read Vincent's letters to his brother Theo; these letters to Theo van Gogh are a description of Vincent's insights into art and his life as an artist. Apparently, it was Irving Stone's Lust for Life that brought Vincent to a wider audience, and fame, in North America. I was never as much a fan of Paul Gauguin as I was of Vincent van Gogh but I did read Noa Noa (1901), Paul Gauguin's "Journal of the South Seas"; this edition was published in 1957 by The Noonday Press, I bought my copy for only 65 cents at the now defunct NDG Paperback around 1985. I inherited Steel of Empire from my stepfather; written by John Murray Gibbon and published in 1935, it is a history of the Canadian Pacific Railroad’s expansion across Canada. These books that I have described were chosen randomly—they were the first books I took from one of the boxes of books where they’d been kept for the last two years after our basement was flooded. It's good to have them back!
