A Book is to Hold

~Post by Julie W.

On Mother’s Day, as my boyfriend and I sat down to lunch with his parents, his mother passed this book across the table.

Printed in 1952, she had shared this book with her brothers growing up. A Hole is to Dig is still in print and it’s on our shelves, so I’m familiar with the book, but handling it there at the table while we heard stories of which sibling had diligently colored in which of Maurice Sendak’s drawings (sometimes inside the lines, sometimes not) and how the book had been passed from child to child, moved me. Here I held in my hand a piece of their family history.

I’m a reader who’s flexible with the times. I think e-Books are great, but seeing this small book reminded me of one of the reasons why I love print books so much. I doubt that fifty years from now I’m going to pass my e-reader on to my grandchildren. The technology will be outdated, the software won’t be compatible. This little book was compatible with my hand decades after its first readers picked it up.

And I did like to think of those first readers flipping to my favorite page, “Cats are so you can have kittens”. Kittens are timeless! Also timeless – Maurice Sendak’s early artwork. You can start to see Max in some of the little boys’ faces.

The way we interact with the world is changing awfully fast, it’s incredible to be alive right now to witness it. This little book made me pause and think through some of that change. We’ll always have objects to serve as touchstones for memory; my favorite will always be books. Especially those books that have been scribbled with crayon by little hands and kept close on a nearby shelf long after the crayons have been put back in their box.