The Dictionary

 

I pulled a dictionary off of the shelf in the living room this morning. There were at least ten other dictionaries sitting near-by. I pulled out the oldest one of the batch. The Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language.

               The red hardback cover is worn and the edges of the pages have a definitely dirty look to them. It has the appearance of being well used.

               The other dictionaries are newer and have more illustrations in them along with some words which weren’t being used when the older book was published. Still, this old worn book is the one that is most often consulted.

               It was a present to my father from my mother on Christmas of 1966. I know this because of the inscription on the title page written by my father. I would have been ten years old that Christmas. I can remember the times my parents sent me to it, to find out how to spell a word or to find out what a word meant. Rather than just telling me, they taught me how to search for an answer.

               There were always books in our house. Reading was one of the things we did! Newspapers, magazines, comic books, Readers Digest compilations and of course, dictionaries, they were all there. My parents had a small collection of books and this prompted me to start my own collection.

               My father taught me when I was small how to treat books. I can remember us sitting at the dining room table and him showing me how to properly turn a page. He explained that I should never lick my finger to help accomplish the task. He told me how I should never write in a book or use thick objects as book marks. I should never have my crayons near a book unless it was a coloring book.

               These instructions didn’t mean a lot to me at the time but I find that to this day, I still follow them. I try my best to keep my books in as good a shape as possible.

               While holding that dictionary, a book that is now in its fifty-fifth year of occupying that shelf, I thought about my parents books. I thought about the quality of them and how they held up through the years. I also thought about how many of them bear inscriptions and signatures and how slips of paper and newspaper articles have stained the pages while they marked favorite recipes or paragraphs. I thought about how so many of them have notes penciled in the borders. These are all things I was instructed not to do, but they are the very things which make these books so valuable to me! 

               The marginalia, the little things my parents left in there for me to find in the future are what make them so special.

               I still attempt to keep my books note free but I don’t have as much aversion as I used to about making a small note in them every so often. Putting a star beside the title of a poem I enjoyed or putting some parentheses around a paragraph I want to remember, I have learned to live with these minor infractions. Yes, I have even underlined a sentence or two occasionally.

               Perhaps someone in the future will find them helpful, humorous or insightful, much like I have. I can only hope!