The time has come to add another bookcase to the walls at home. I really thought it would take longer. Less than two years since the last set of new bookcases, and the shelves are full. A pile of books half obscures the computer. To turn on the radio, first I must displace two stacks. Meanwhile, my father is threatening to ship me all his books.
The saving and strategising must start again: where will the new bookcase go? Can we afford it? How many shelves must it have? How can we improve on the design? (Dust! You can never defeat it, but you can’t stop trying.)
And when the carpenter is recruited and the design finalised, the bookcase anticipated and delivered, the shelves and glass wiped down and admired, then the other enormous task begins: deciding what books to move in, and how. You see, there’s nothing haphazard about our shelving. There are sections for fiction and non-fiction, history, biography, travel, science, poetry and plays, language, children. And within categories the books are arranged alphabetically by author or subject. Please don’t laugh. It took a long time. So, adding new shelves will affect the entire status quo. One feels excitement and despair.
Books are hard work. This came to mind as I watched, the other day, the last moments of a very nice animated short film called The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore, released in 2011 in America but available on the Internet. Its IMDb summary calls it, rather off-puttingly, “a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative powers of story”.
The film’s chief inspiration appears to have been L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, specifically the part where Dorothy is picked up by a tornado and carried off to Oz. The film begins with a young man, Mr Lessmore presumably, sitting on a balcony. He is writing in a notebook. All of a sudden a storm blows in and whisks him, together with hat, cane and notebook, off to a black-and-white world that looks like a kinder version of what Hurricane Katrina left behind.
There’s no plot as such, so no surprises to spoil. I’ll hurry you through the story. Our Lessmore is walking away when he sees, in a blue sky, a slim woman being towed through the air by a colourful flock of books. She lets one go, and it flutters down to Lessmore. This friendly book (clever animation, here) guides him over a fence and through a park to a library whose shelves are filled with thousands of these birdlike books. As he crosses the threshold, he transitions from black-and-white to colour.
Turns out, that flying woman was the last librarian. Now it is Lessmore’s turn to care for these books, and to give each person who visits the library in the park just the right book. He repairs elderly books and gives little books their breakfast (alphabet cereal). He reads, under a tree. And he continues writing in his notebook.
And thus the final scenes: one day he finishes his writing. The screen shows an old man. Lessmore has plainly spent his whole life in the library. He, too, is towed away into the sky like his predecessor, but leaves his own, finished book to flutter down and join the library.
Sentimental, yes. But also true. Books are for a lifetime. Books are hard work, and not just physical work. They require real dedication or they will not yield real value. I once sighed to my college advisor, a wonderful man, about all the reading I was having to do. He told me — and it was not chat but part of my apprenticeship — “You have to be voracious.” He meant, you should be reading even more. Well, I try.
