Offloading garbage in Seattle can trigger a chain reaction. My condo building has a garbage room where large metal bins are designated for different types of trash: paper, glass, and cardboard boxes. Things like rotten food, eggshells, and kitty litter cannot be recycled and are dumped into the trash bins assigned to stinky garbage. There is a human tendency to scan the bins to see if everyone is doing the right thing—putting their garbage into the bin where it belongs. In this very green city, whistleblowers are encouraged to shout.
The condo garbage room holds more than trash bins. Next to the bin designated for paper a six-foot-tall bookcase sits flush to the wall. People put the books they no longer want on the bookshelf. Most books cycle through and find a home. Few books stay here forever with the possible exception of Bill Clinton’s memoir My Life. So last week I was astonished to find an old hardcover book stuffed inside a trash bin. It was unthinkable that anyone would throw away a book.
The book I found in the trash was not a mediocre mystery, nor a heavily borrowed, marked-up Urdu phrase book. Books like that have already found a home. The book I found was as heavy as a doorstop and could be used as a murder weapon. From the paper bin in between two crushed Amazon boxes, I had rescued The Life of Greece by Will Durant. After I pried the first book free, I spied another Durant classic, The Age of Faith. Soon another Durant book, The Age of Reason, bobbed above obnoxious bricks of Styrofoam. I was beside myself. The three books were part of the collection The Story of Civilization.
I reveled in my find because it was coincidental. In my latest book, The Death of a Library, I had written about a Yonkers librarian, Miss Helen Blodgett, who in 1934 had named Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy as hugely popular. Will Durant’s rendering of history had piqued my curiosity. Only a month ago, I bought the entire series written by Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon published his massive work in 1776, the same year the Declaration of Independence proclaimed our statehood as a nation. I digress but sit tight and be patient with me; the correlation between history and books and democracy is yet to come.
My good fortune in the garbage room gave me the chance to read Will Durant’s work as surely as if I had gone to the library and checked out his books. It was only through happenstance that I had experienced a windfall. The Will Durant books were indisputably mine and for free. But I also wondered, who would throw away great books? The bookcase in the garbage room stood like a pillar with open arms clamoring for castoffs. Examining the books for wear and tear, I noticed they would be deemed to be in very good condition, probably fetching more than ten bucks a book in the Amazon reseller market. It’s a five-minute walk to the Pike Place Market where three used bookstores would happily have acquired the history books written by Mr. Durant. (One was cowritten with his wife Ariel). There I go, digressing again.
History Does Matter
by Patricia Vaccarino