Just about my favorite place in the whole world is our family’s beach house in Rhode Island. The minute I walk in the door, all I can think about is getting to the beach, seeing family and friends and relaxing in a house that has a lower threshold of responsibilities (at least during July and August).
During a brief visit in the late 1950’s, my parents quickly fell in love with the ocean, the beach, the pond, the people and the tempo of a Quonnie summer day. They decided to build a cottage and set down roots there. They lived the summer dream for the next fifty odd years, until they could no longer make the trip.
To my great joy and relief, the very first time my future husband visited Quonochontaug, he immediately recognized its charms and announced, “I like it here.” With that, he opened a book and happily passed an afternoon reading a biography of Theodore Roosevelt. It was a window into the future.
A day at the beach with a good book is one of the finer elixir’s in life. Better yet, after a day of fun, a nice dinner and feeling the pleasant effect of a full day and perhaps, a bit of wine, a good read at night is one of my greatest creature comforts.
Our current house features the new mixed in with the old. It was built in 1978, and not much had been changed over the years, so, in 2004, we completely updated the kitchen with a fresh design and all-new everything else – counters, cabinets, appliances – plus the nifty addition of an island with three bar stools. The rest of the upstairs floor is framed with knotty pine walls, many of which are the left-over timber from our first Quonnie house built in 1962. He also used some of the wood in other rooms as well.
And of course, many books, both old and new, hardcover and softcover, populate Dad’s hand-crafted bookshelves throughout the house. He was the son of a master craftsman builder and was a good trim carpenter himself. A lawyer by trade, he also served as general contractor and architect on several family homes he built over the years. The discrete pencil marks from Dad’s original measurements are still visible on the bottoms of the unpainted wood shelves. For all his trim work, he always had a sharp knife blade handy to peel away the wood from the flat, rectangular pencils.
The shelf trim is not fancy. They have a nice, simple design. The bookshelves are filled with Pulitzer Prize winners, books given to my folks that they left behind and books we had been given years ago. There are books they had bought, books from their book club, books from their childhood and books from our childhood. Some of the oldest were printed more than 100 years ago.
Sitting in bed, you can spot most of the old books from across the room. Dog eared hardcovers, some with jackets, old leather-bound books with faded titles, weathered biographies of important mid-19th century leaders, and children’s books from way back in the day, circa 1921 – 1950’s, pickle the shelves.
The book selection at the house could be called eclectic. Mom and Dad must have joined the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books club for a couple of years, as the Digests dominate one of our bookshelves in particular, with their gold lettered, multi-titled book bindings sitting neatly beside other original hardcovers. I think my parents thought the anthologies were a practical solution for a beach house as you could knock off one of those babies in a weekend visit, no problem. Maybe even two!
Some of the regular titles bring you back to another era. There’s a book about Eamon De Valera, third President of modern Ireland. Having heard of him only in passing over the years, I learned a great deal by thumbing through this book. The formation of the Irish Free State must have been important to my father, as his grandparents always self-identified on census forms as from the “Irish Free State.”
One of the first books I picked up last summer, which I had never read, is called Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge (1944, Coward McCann). My mother had written her name on the inside page in her neat convent trained cursive. I flipped the page over and there in black letters rests my first name, MARIANNE, as the title of Part I. Curious.
A sweet hardcover volume of Walden by Henry David Thoreau (Henry Altemus Company, 1899) was inscribed to our Grandmother in June 1904 by her teacher. She would have been fifteen. This felt especially poignant. We never knew her as she unexpectedly died when my mother was still a young girl, and long before we grandchildren came along.
Another book, The Cardinal, (by Henry Morton Robinson, 1950, published by Simon & Schuster) was given to my mother’s father. An inscription reads “Hope you can clear some space on your desk this summer…” with an undecipherable signature. This book was the number one fiction best seller that year, according to Cader Books.
The inscription in Guns, Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond, 1997, W.W. Norton Publishers) made me pause. It reads “Bill, Happy reading. Paul.” I remember Bill being given this book by his late friend Paul Bakker, who died too young in his early fifties. Paul had loved the book and gave it to Bill for a birthday gift. My husband enjoyed it very much.
There are hundreds of books in the house, possibly even several thousand. Even though these are only possessions, it is nice to reach back and see, through the books themselves or the inscriptions, just what everyone was reading. Beach house bookshelves filled with good books from any era is a gift. It’s a double escape and may also be a window to the past – and a great excuse to put down your cell phone.
Over the past twenty years, since we’ve taken stewardship of the house, we’ve added several hundred selections from our own broader collection, as well as some new dad-style bookcases to put them in. Important traditions never end – even in the emerging era of eBooks.