Saying Goodbye to My Parents’ Library - WSJ

Saying Goodbye to My Parents’ Library - WSJ Saying Goodbye to My Parents’ Library wsj.com/articles/saying-goodbye-to-my-parents-library-11661572861 August 27, 2022 By Christopher Lloyd Aug. 27, 2022 12:01 am ET 90 My mother, 12 years a widow and a deeply private woman all her life, died in January, at home, surrounded by 800 friends. Like my father, she had entered the workforce as a high school English teacher, serving in a rough area of New Haven, Conn., where she was once admonished by a student for calling Shakespeare’s Polonius a criminal (“I checked with my parole officer, Mizz Lloyd—he was an accessory.”). And like my father she adored books—teaching them, reading them, owning them. But in those days of $4,000 annual salaries, neither she nor my father could remotely have foreseen building a world-class collection of first editions, 800 of which graced the shelves of the home library into which she had moved a hospital bed for her final days. So it was bittersweet this month to watch my parents’ collection sold via online auction to settle their estate. One at a time they went, one per minute, each with a ping of the computer, a steady disassembly of this literary family built over 50 years—orphans sent to new homes. Groaning shelves and unclosable cabinets were features of every house we advanced through. Books surrounded us growing up—us being the surviving children, an edition of five, of which I was the second printing. Groaning shelves and unclosable cabinets were features of every house we advanced through as my father forged a career as a television writer. His first job in TV was as a monologue writer for Johnny Carson, which became a springboard to writing for such shows as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Taxi,” “Cheers” and “Frasier.” Along the way, the books got upgraded, some beginning to wear protective jackets (hmm…did standard-issue “Sister Carrie” sneer looking up at untouchable, plastic-adorned “Lolita”)? Newsletter Sign-up Grapevine A weekly look at our most colorful, thought-provoking and original feature stories on the business of life. When my father won his first Emmy in 1976, for the “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, he indulged himself not with a Porsche but with “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (lot 161). He was nominated again the next year but lost. Was that what inspired him to buy “The Grapes of Wrath” (lot 273)? Deliveries seemed to come daily, sometimes more than once. At least, that’s how I imagine “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (lot 13) joined the team. And it came to be an eclectic population on those shelves: “The Thin Man” (lot 58) squeezed between “Goldfinger” (lot 110) and “Winnie the Pooh” (lot 81); “The Wizard of Oz” (lot 2) warily eyeing “Harry Potter” (lot 251). “The Catcher in the Rye” (lot 96) stood off by himself. The author in his parents’ library in 1994.Photo: Chris Lloyd My parents’ library grew to contain perhaps 3,000 volumes, with those rarest 800 a source of pride and of abiding interest to most of their guests. If you had dinner at Siegfried and Roy’s house, you shook hands with a white tiger. If you ate at my parents’ home, it was a first edition of “The Great Gatsby” in your hands. And the magic of that moment is exactly what electrifies the first-edition collector. Hold that book with its luminous purple cover and you are back in 1925, when it was published and changed the world. And now those books were all going away. It was a little like seeing your family home taken apart one brick at a time. Ping! “Farewell My Lovely” (lot 16). Ping! “A Farewell To Arms” (lot 140). In fairness, books have a complicated history in my family. One delayed my own fretful entrance: When the doctor wanted to induce my mother’s labor, she asked him to come back in an hour as she wanted to finish Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit.” Not long before, she’d gone to see her own father in the hospital. Sensing that she wanted to leave but felt too guilty to say so, he assured her he had plenty to keep him company and patted the book tented on his chest. He died during the night. Advertisement - Scroll to Continue Books were also cudgels in my home. If you weren’t reading enough, you were informed. I was once made to spend an entire day at a beach house locked in a room until I’d read 80 pages. Was that tough-love character-building or a way that my father bought quiet so he could get back to whatever wind-whipped pages he was immersed in that day? Ping! “The Old Man and the Sea” (lot 147). SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS What are your family’s traditions about books and reading? Join the conversation below. If any of this sounds joyless, it should not. Yes, my father led the two of them into the hobby, but Mizz Lloyd was soon his equally passionate accessory. I can recall seeing them one day beholding a “Red Badge of Courage” whose formerly chipped pages had been restored by a 90-year-old paper weaver in the Midwest. The looks of adoration on their faces were of a kind seldom seen outside of a manger. These nerds were into this stuff. Ping! “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” (lot 206). What do old books even mean to people anymore? Many modern phone-gazers surely would get sleepy even looking at a first edition. Will books keep mattering in an age where Instagram and TikTok are the glasses-stomping bullies shoving them aside for the contested space in people’s brains? It’s easy to see how, for some, modern digital living—that feeling you can have, via your phone, of being with your friends all day every day, included in whatever they are doing—might seem a more nurturing arrangement than, say, my father enjoying “Death in the Afternoon” (lot 142) and my mother “Brideshead Revisited” (lot 114), their minds distanced by hundreds of miles even if their knees were inches apart. So books may be losing the battle, but… Ping! “Did She Fall?” (lot 263) …someone just bought that book by Thorne Smith. Now I will gladly make you this bet: We take a walk down your street, ask each passerby if they know who Thorne Smith is, and for each yes we get, I will eat a yellowjacket. But that person is out there, maybe a wall away from someone else buying an NFT through the same cybersphere. And I love that this person is out there, because someone caring enough to buy an esoteric book tells me that books aren’t going anywhere, not yet. Learned old people, like my parents, drop off the conveyor belt every day, and babies get dropped on the belt at the beginning, and books are still the best vessels we have for pouring wisdom into their squishy brains. Books still matter, deeply, to some people—the kind of people who might have enjoyed a moment from my mom’s last days, the vigil days, when the family was asked by a visitor where the Ross Macdonald books were and, from her bed, an index finger shot out, archer-true, pointing at shelf 4 in bookcase 7. The auction rolls to its end, the books all adopted. My mind wanders back to a final stroll I took through my parents’ library just before the home was sold—acres of empty shelves, a breath-catching sight. A quiet library is quieter when the books are gone. But those books are noisy somewhere, on new shelves, in new hands, seeding new collections, straining budgets, firing imaginations—living things, as they were meant to be. Mr. Lloyd is the co-creator of “Modern Family” and the longtime showrunner of “Frasier.” Corrections & Amplifications An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of the writer Ross Macdonald as McDonald. (Corrected on Aug. 29) Appeared in the August 27, 2022, print edition as 'Saying Goodbye to My Parents’ Library'. Sponsored Offers Walmart: Walmart coupon: $20 off your $50+ order Wayfair: Up to 15% off + free shipping at Wayfair The Home Depot: Home Depot Daily Deal: 50% off massage chairs Nike: Nike Labor Day Sale: Up to 40% off fall must-haves Expedia: Today's Expedia promo code: Extra 8% off your stay Hotels.com: Hotels.com September Deals - Save 20% or more