Floods and Arks – Private Libraries and the Preservation of Western Culture
by Missy Andrews
Over the past several years I have become aware of a growing conversation around the issue of independent bookstores. These are, as I’m sure you are aware, disappearing in the wake of larger book sellers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, who offer substantial discounts, free shipping, and easy payment options through their membership platforms. Small book sellers simply cannot compete with the pricing of their larger competitors, who buy in bulk and are able to undercut their small-scale counterparts.
This is the nature of business, right? Yet the consequences of efficiently doing away with these smaller bookstores effectively reduces the options of both buyers and publishers in the marketplace. If larger box bookstores hold the key to the market, eventually they will control the type of literature being produced and disseminated, and whoever does that controls much more than the market.
The gatekeepers of ideas effectively control society. Do we want money to be the bottom line in this venture? Do we want a small number of owner operators, driven by the bottom line, to become the arbiters of culture-building in the marketplace of ideas?
Of course, this conversation is not new. Authors like Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell explored the gatekeeping of culture in their popular (and prescient) 20th century dystopian novels. Lately, this old concern is cropping up in new iterations like this one regarding the David and Goliath contest between big booksellers and their small, independent competitors, suggesting that these issues outstrip their social immediacy.
Authors like Rod Dreher (Live Not by Lies and The Benedict Option) have proposed antidotes for the present cultural erosion, suggesting that small communities might become ready repositories of Western thought and culture. Like the monasteries of the Dark Ages, families, churches, and small groups may serve as arks of Western society while the floods of public opinion rise and drown (or cancel) revered voices of the past.
I visited one such ark yesterday, the private library of a friend I’ve known casually for years. She was among those ladies that attended my prequel to Teaching the Classics, years before I ever dreamt of creating our curriculum. Then, she was a homeschool mom, utilizing the Charlotte Mason living books model and looking for a better way to discuss stories with her two boys. Now she is a grandmother and spends her time cataloguing the over 20,000 titles she has accumulated over the past 27 years. That’s right, folks, over 20,000 books.
Walking through her home was like dropping into the pages of Sarah Stewart’s The Library. There were books everywhere! Biographies occupied the floor-to-ceiling shelves in the hallway. Art and music made their home in the dining room, which must once have served as the family’s homeschool classroom. Moving down the stairs, I found a fair collection of children’s poetry on the landing shelves. The stair treads themselves each contained a tower of books with an index card atop, indicating their place in the Dewey decimal system. A stack of applied science and technology (600s) titles hugged the wall on the final steps to the basement, which room housed the larger portion of shelved titles. (Still more volumes are stored in labeled banker’s boxes until needed.) Stack upon stack, row upon row of shelves held science and nature, geography and languages, history and theology and fiction. A low, double-sided bookcase held children’s picture book classics, where I crouched for an hour viewing a treasure trove of out-of-print titles.
Of course, it is these out-of-print selections that are the true gems of the collection and a significant factor in making this library available to local Charlotte Mason homeschoolers in the area. To accumulate such a collection requires not only time, knowledge, and patience, but also a substantial financial investment that few homeschool families can afford to make. Thumbing through books no longer produced, I observed not only a change in art, but a change in subject matter, tone, and ethics. With changes in social mores comes a change in literary production, something we’ve witnessed recently with the cancelation of classic books like Little House on the Prairie and To Think That It Happened on Mulberry Street. And although what’s lost may be debated, the very existence of such a debate is made possible by the availability of books such as these. When they are excised and fall out of print or are modified to appease the cultural consensus, the conversation they provoke is lost.
Such conversations are the heartbeat of literature, and classic books the “best that has ever been thought or said” on their given subjects. Though not every book contains the Truth, each represents a facet of the ongoing discussion of the Permanent Things, those universals that remain prominent in the conversations of each generation about the nature of reality and man. Silence any author and lose a thread of the historic conversation.
But not if my friend has anything to say about it! There, in her stacks, is a well-preserved collection of Western thought, available to friends and patrons of her library for a mere $70 annually. Today’s public library system purports to make knowledge available to the masses, but my own local branch continues to liquidate their stacks to make room for increasingly more digital resources. Library book sales yield their treasures to collectors like my friend, who purchase for a song what public tax dollars bought at full cost, only to squander.
I learned from my friend that her library is not singular in its kind. In fact, an entire subculture of private librarians discuss their trade on sites like thecardcataloglibrarians.com and plumfieldmoms.com (see their living library). The first of these touts a list of private libraries in the US and Canada, and it’s longer than you might expect. Here is a worm hole into which I’m happy to fall!
I left my friend’s library feeling warm and hopeful, inspired and encouraged. With caches like hers extant, our cultural heritage just might survive the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” to reseed Western society for future generations. And here is another way that the independent homeschooling family just might transform our world into a better place! My hat’s off to my friend and others like her, investing in future generations by curating heirloom seed libraries which will inevitably produce gardens of good thought for many generations.
Thank you for this beautiful piece! I have the privilege of being one of the librarians in this movement, and you have so excellently captured the why behind what so many of us are doing. It is our love for children—their formation, their imaginations, and the future of our culture—that compels us to save, treasure, and share these essential books. Many of us are longtime followers of your work, and we’re deeply grateful for the way Center for Lit continues to champion the classics and elevate this conversation. We would love nothing more than for there to be a living books library in every county in our country!
Thank you for writing this. I am one of those librarians you mention with a private lending library in Houston, TX. We are small, but mighty and growing.