Josy's Little Library: Useless Old Books

Just the feel of a book in one's hand can bring up all sorts of emotions related to the past, present and future. That happened the other day as I thumbed through the book Class Reunion by Rona Jaffe in one of those Little Free Libraries in our town in France. Since English books are rare free finds, I usually don’t hesitate to take one when I find it, secretly exchanging it for a French one (to be fair, they never specified that the exchanges have to made in the same language!).

My find: Class Reunion by Rona Jaffe, first published in 1979.

I didn’t yet know anything about Rona Jaffe and the plot of Class Reunion (first published in 1979) wasn't the aspect of the book that interested me the most. In fact, I’m not even sure if the subject matter is my favorite, or if I’ll have time to read it right away, and I certainly know it won’t be read by my tiny daughter Josy anytime soon. What did make me ponder the cover and pages, however, was the form and how it brought me back decades to a world before the Internet and my 1990s childhood. I glanced away from the pages at Josy in her stroller. As I watched her sleeping peacefully next to the Little Free Library box, I was brought forward to the life and times that my young child hasn’t yet experienced.

After all, I mostly see Josy’s Little Library as a legacy library, and her books as a way to guide her through life. Everything I want to pass down to her—values, family stories, history—can be found in the books I have and will add to it. The values can be found in a variety of non-fiction books I’ve chosen for that reason, in our religious books and the books I write myself. For family stories, I have books about the countries her ancestors originally came from, or ones that even mention her long-deceased relatives by name. History, of course, is not only taught from books that talk about the past, but books that were written in the past and existed as objects in the past.

Class Reunion, a book I had never heard of before by an author I didn’t know, was that sort of book, I thought, as I walked back home. There were a few elements I had seen in it that don’t exist in books anymore, or are rare in recent publications. Nostalgia is not always the most reliable narrator of our past as it sometimes makes it seem too idealistic for our own good, but these elements stirred up a remembrance of how I had once lived, and the fact that my own child may never have those same experiences, except, perhaps in the pages of a book, even one she might not read from start to finish.

Here are some examples of those elements:

1. The clip-and-send coupon at the back to order other books from the publisher (no website, of course) reminded me of walks to the post office with my own mom, a fervent letter writer who even to this day continues that waning tradition.

2. A reminder that readers at the time would “take the phone off the hook” to disconnect from the outside world (as opposed to “putting it on silence” or “turning off notifications”) when they wanted quiet reading time. A flashback to my parents’ own rotary dial phone, and a reminder that this phrase might cause confusion to someone my daughter’s age if they haven’t been exposed to history.

3. The unabashed excitement in the marketing language right on the front cover (“THE EVENT OF THE DECADE! THE BEST-SELLER OF THE YEAR!”) made me think about how important language was in marketing without flashy social media videos to do the job for them.

4. The short, unassuming author biography. Just basic information that makes it seem like the author didn’t have to share every detail of her personal life and long list of accomplishments to appear important. She didn’t have to create three social media accounts for her publisher and promote herself as a person in order to market her books (no judgement here of modern-day authors, as I’m guilty myself of this one!). She probably did have to resort to other means, of course, like in-person events and signings that many authors today don't need thanks to the Internet.

5. The handwritten “Merry Christmas 1980 – Love, Kim” scribbled on the first page made me wonder Who received this gift? Who was Kim? Who else leafed through these well-loved pages before passing it on to that Little Free Library? Which types of people read this book? Did the women who read it then have the same hopes, fears and dreams as women today?

These reminders and questions will be stocked away in Class Reunion on my daughter’s bookshelf, even though neither I nor Josy has read it yet. Maybe we wouldn’t even like it if we did… or maybe we will (I did a little research after getting home from that Little Free Library. I decided it could be interesting to see why Raffe’s books were popular with women at the time and what it was like to go to college and find one’s way in the world as a female from her point of view).

In the end, some books on Josy’s shelf might not be amazing or well-written or popular at the time they were written. But I’ll keep them around as reminders, as artefacts, as appreciation for them as objects from the past that remind me (and will remind Josy) of its existence in a different space and time.

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