The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

One of the latest trends in trend-crazy America is to create a personal library in our domiciles. Not to amass a collection from our reading list (if we even have one) but to impress our visitors with volumes of literature and non-fiction. A well-stocked library should subtly send the message that its owners are erudite readers with broad and eclectic tastes. Sprinkle in a few Booker award novels among the classics, add some poetry anthologies, spice the biblioteca up with an encyclopedic array from the sciences, philosophies, a few avant-garde pieces and certainly oversized art books. Wow them with your extensive and expensive tastes!

But before you hurry out to your nearest Goodwill to find the raw materials for your Jeffersonian library, l should add that if you really want to impress your friends and neighbors, just piling dog-eared books on a make-shift shelf really isn’t going to do the trick. No, you need the equivalent of an oak paneled room, floor to ceiling shelving, preferably behind glass and if you have the ideal height, one of those rolling ladders necessary to access the hard-to-reach collection of rare books up at the top. First editions are a must and signed copies de rigueur in these unenlightened times of Google and Wickipedia. You are a person of discriminating tastes, my friend, not one of the yammering yokels who would ask why they would need a community library when they have a laptop.

Suffice it say it would be imperative to have a well-used armchair with adequate lighting beside it as well as a sturdy stand with one or more books ‘in progress’ even if you never plan to open another book to read in your entire life. The gesture is what counts. And hopefully your guests will never query you as to that current reading. If so, simply tell them you have only begun Chapter One and to make judgement at so early a stage would be foolish. You, needless to say, are not foolish. The library itself will attest to that. No, you sir are of finer mettle, a lord in the land of the Kindle, a giant among the unread. Relish your place above the unwashed masses. You’ve earned it!

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