Who Is Bookworm?
Bookworm is a middle aged woman who has been crazy for books since she read her first one "Sam and the Firefly" by P.D. Eastman about age six.
Bookworm ran home to her mother to share the Big News... "I can read!" Mother said, "Yes, and now the whole world is yours. You can explore any country, any museum, any time and any person's imagination. It is all opened to you because now you can read."
Bookworm took the keys to the World and ran with them. The local library in her village was Very Small. Bookworm began reading through the adult fiction shelf at a very early age. Indeed at about 12 years old she was stopped by a librarian in the next town when trying to check out volume one of the Alexandrian Quartet. "Does your mother know you are reading this?"
Well, one phone call and Mother was put on the spot. "Don't you think this is rather too mature for a child to be reading?" And the Mother rememberd the day when her little girl came home in a fit of excitement over "Sam and the Firefly" and her promise that now the World was hers. "No," said the Mother to the tight-laced librarian, "my daughter has permission to read anything she is interested in."
And read she did. Over the years Bookworm has been a member of the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art New York Library, the San Francisco Public Library, the Berkely Public Library, the Baker Library at Dartmouth College, and numerous other libraries. When one day Bookworm saw a man leave the San Francisco Public Library and turn back to face the entrance, get on his knees and bow in prayer, she was not surprised.
When she was eleven Bookworm had an experience with the magic power of books. Bedridden due to tonsilitus she snuck downstairs to look at the "Forbidden Bookshelf." Mother kept all her college books there and her personal collection of favorites. The children in the house knew from toddler-age "Don't touch the books!" Well nothing is so attractive as that which is out of reach... though why these books were on one of the bottom-most shelf of the wall high bookshelf I still can't understand.
Bookworm, with some stealth, took Plato's Republic off the shelf, hid it under her nightgown and went back to her bed. And started reading the most Interesting stuff she had ever read. The dialogue was about Justice, and the debate was passing back and forth between Glaucon and Socrates. Bookworm got very excited because she had a novel argument she couldnt find in the book.
Being a child she still had Magical Thinking. She scribbled her arguement on a scrap of paper and inserted it where the two men were having their debate. Slapping the book closed with a thump she put it under her pillow and went to sleep. She believed that in the morning when she opened Plato's Republic her argument would have been printed there with Plato and Glaucon and her ideas would take the conversation between them in a new way.
Well, in the morning her magic editing had not worked. But she continued to believe she had Something to Say and that her thoughts were every bit as worthwhile as the shaggy headed philosopher and his companion.. that dullard Glaucon. Storm clouds were brewing, however, in these innocent ideas that a girl or a woman was every bit as capable as a man or a boy to solve problems, to think, to write, to create, to work. Whenever she found out that women were excluded in any field, even in consideration, Bookworm always felt something was fundamentally wrong in the mindset that created histories and culture economies out of this exclusion. And so Bookworm grew up feeling like a Stranger in a Strange land.
(You have noted by now that by my use of Capitals I also read Kay Thompson's Elouise more than once.)
This famous picture "The Bookworm" was in the room of Bookworm's great-grandmother. Love of books runs in the family.
Insert Burgess Meredith Twilight Zone all the books in the world and time to read them but then he breaks his glasses.
Over the years Bookworm has amassed three significant libraries of her own. The first two she sold in dire situations. The contents of this site, the third library, she is selling out of love. Every single book on sale here Bookworm has read and sometimes read again. This library on sale is, in effect, a map of all the wonderful worlds she has explored. Art, art history, art criticism, the Classics, Picasso, the Guggenheims and the Guggenheim Museum, Buddhism, the workings of the creative mind, Philosophy and more.
