My father loved books ravenously, and his always had a

devoured look to them.

Personal History

MY FATHER’S STACK OF BOOKS

When he was a child, books were gifts. For his daughters,
he made sure they were a given.
By Kathryn Schulz
March 18, 2019

When I was a child, the grownup books in my house were

arranged according to two principles. One of these, which
governed the downstairs books, was instituted by my mother,
and involved achieving a remarkable harmony—one that anyone
who has ever tried to organize a home library would envy—
among thematic, alphabetic, and aesthetic demands. The other,
which governed the upstairs books, was instituted by my father,
and was based on the conviction that it is very nice to have
everything you’ve recently read near at hand, in case you get
the urge to consult any of it again; and also that it is a pain in
the neck to put those books away, especially when the shelves
on which they belong are so exquisitely organized that returning
one to its appropriate slot requires not only a card catalogue but
a crowbar.
It was this pair of convictions that led to the development of
the Stack. I can’t remember it in its early days, because in its
early days it wasn’t memorable. I suppose back then it was just
a modest little pile of stray books, the kind that many readers
have lying around in the living room or next to the bed. But by
the time I was in my early teens it was the case—and seemed
by then to have always been the case—that my parents’ bedroom
was home to the Mt. Kilimanjaro of books. Or perhaps more aptly
the Mt. St. Helens of books, since it seemed possible that at any
moment some subterranean shift in it might cause a cataclysm.
The Stack had started in a recessed space near my father’s
half of the bed, bounded on one side by a wall and on the other
by my parents’ dresser, a vertical behemoth taller than I would
ever be. At some point in the Stack’s development, it had
overtopped that piece of furniture, whereupon it met a second
tower of books, which, at some slightly later point, had begun
growing up along the dresser’s other side. For some reason,
though, the Stack always looked to me as if it had defied gravity
(or perhaps obeyed some other, more mysterious force) and
grown down the far side of the dresser instead. At all events, the
result was a kind of homemade Arc de Triomphe, extremely
haphazard-looking but basically stable, made of some three or
four hundred books.
I have no idea why we called this entity the Stack, considering
the word’s orderly connotations of squared-off edges and the
shelving areas of libraries. It’s true that the younger side of the
Stack mounted toward the ceiling in relatively tidy fashion, like
the floors of a high-rise—a concession to its greater proximity to
the doorway, and thus to the more trafficked area of the
bedroom, where a sudden collapse could have been catastrophic.
But the original side was another story. Few generally vertical
structures have ever been less stacklike, and no method of
storing books has ever looked less like a shelf.
Some people love books reverently—my great-aunt, for
instance, a librarian and a passionate reader who declined to
open any volume beyond a hundred-degree angle, so tenderly
did she treat their spines. My father, by contrast, loved books
ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled
on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with
coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored
shells of peanut M&M’s. (I have inherited his pragmatic attitude
toward books and deliberately break the spine of every
paperback I start, because I like to fold them in half while reading
them.) In addition to the Stack, my father typically had on his
bedside table the five or six books he was currently reading—a
novel or two, a few works of nonfiction, a volume of poetry,
“Comprehensive Russian Grammar” or some other textbooky
thing—and when he finished one of these he would toss it into
the space between the dresser and the wall. Compression and
accumulation—especially accumulation—did the rest.
To my regret, I have only a single photograph of the result. I
have spent a great deal of time studying it, yet find many of the
books in it impossible to identify. Some tumbled into the Stack
spine in, rendering them wholly unknowable, while others fell
victim to low resolution, including a few that are maddeningly
familiar: an Oxford Anthology whose navy binding and gold
stamp I recognize but whose spine is too blurry to read; a book
that is unmistakably a Penguin Classic, but that hardly narrows
it down; an Idiot’s Guide to I don’t know what. In some cases, I
can make out the title but had to look up the author: “Pirate
Latitudes” (Michael Crichton), “Mayflower” (Nathaniel Philbrick),
“Small World” (David Lodge), “The Way Things Were” (Aatish
Taseer). In others, conversely, I can see the author but not the
title: something by Carl Hiaasen, something by Wally Lamb,
something by Nadine Gordimer, something by Gore Vidal.
Plenty of other books in the Stack, however, are perfectly
visible, and perfectly familiar. There’s the collected works of
Edgar Allan Poe; there’s “Pale Fire” and “White Teeth”; there’s
“Infinite Jest” and “Amerika.” There’s Wallace Stegner’s “Angle
of Repose,” a book my father mailed to me in my early twenties,
together with “Our Mutual Friend,” when I was travelling and
lonely and had run out ofthings to read. In the Stack, Stegner’s
novel has achieved its own angle of repose, alongside Richard
Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible?” and Antonio Damasio’s “The
Feeling of What Happens.” Above that is Stephen E. Ambrose’s
“Undaunted Courage,” about Lewis and Clark’s westward
journey, and Diane McWhorter’s “Carry Me Home,” about the
civil-rights movement in Birmingham. There’s Thomas Pynchon’s
“Mason & Dixon” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” Michael
Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” and Beryl
Markham’s “West with the Night.” There are books I can
remember discussing with my father—Ian McEwan’s
“Atonement,” Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” Sarah Bakewell’s
“How to Live”—together with books I had no idea he’d read and,
despite his insatiable curiosity, no idea he would have cared to
read: the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds, Temple
Grandin’s “Animals in Translation,” Neal Stephenson’s
“Cryptonomicon.”
I’m not sure exactly when this photograph of the Stack was
taken. It must have been after the fall of 2012, since one of the
books visible is Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve,” which came
out in September of that year, and before 2016, when my
parents moved out of their home of thirty years and into a condo,
the kind with no stairs for them to fall down and less space to
manage as they aged. There were plenty of books in the new
place, though, and a nice wide clearing by the side of the bed,
so I suspect that, given enough time, it would have housed some
kind of Stack 2.0. But it did not, because seven months after my
parents moved in my father died. On his bedside table at the
time was a new edition of “Middlemarch,” together with a copy
of “SPQR,” Mary Beard’s history of ancient Rome, and Kent
Haruf’s “Plainsong.” “Middlemarch” my father regarded as the
greatest novel in the English language and had been rereading
for at least the sixth time. I don’t know if he had completed either
of the other two books, or even begun them. But it doesn’t make
any difference, I suppose. No matter when my father died, he
would have been—as, one way or another, we all are when we
die—in the middle of something.

I don’t know where my father got his love of books. His own
father, a plumber by trade, was an epic raconteur but not, to my
knowledge, much of a reader. His mother, the youngest of
thirteen children, was sent for her protection from a Polish shtetl
to Palestine at the start of the Second World War, only to learn
afterward that her parents and eleven of her twelve siblings had
perished in Auschwitz. Whoever she might otherwise have been
died then, too; the woman she became was volatile, unhappy,
and inscrutable. My father was never even entirely sure how
literate she was—in any language, and least of all in English,
which he himself began learning at the age of eleven, when the
family arrived in the United States on refugee visas and settled
in Detroit.
It’s possible that my father turned to books to escape his
parents’ chronic fighting, although I don’t know that for sure. I
do know that when he was nineteen he left Michigan for
Manhattan, imagining a glamorous new life in the city that had
so impressed him when he first arrived in America. Instead, he
found penury on the Bowery. To save money, he walked each
day from his tenement to a job at a drugstore on the Upper West
Side, then home again by way of the New York Public Library.
Long before I had ever been there myself, I heard my father
describe in rapturous terms the countless hours he had spent in
what is now the Rose Reading Room, and the respite that he
found there.
But if books were a gift for my father—transportive, salvific—
he made sure that, for his children, they were a given. In one of
my earliest memories, he has suddenly materialized in the
doorway of the room where my sister and I were playing, holding
a Norton Anthology of Poetry in one hand and waving the other
aloft like Moses or Merlin while reciting “Kubla Khan.” Throughout
my childhood, it was his job to read aloud to us at bedtime; to
our delight, he could not be counted on to stick to the text on
the page, and on the best nights he ditched the books altogether
and regaled us with the homegrown adventures of Yana and
Egbert, two danger-prone siblings from, of all places, Rotterdam.
(My father had a keen ear for the kind of word that would make
young children laugh, and that was one of them.) Those stories
struck me as terrific not only at the time but again much later,
when I was old enough to realize how difficult it is to construct a
decent plot. When I asked my father how he had done it, he
confessed that he had routinely whiled away his evening
commute constructing those bedtime tales. I regret to this day
that none of us ever thought to write them down.
In a kinder world—one where my father’s childhood had been
less desperate, his fear of financial instability less acute, his
sense of the options available to him less constrained—I suspect
that he would have grown up to be a professor, like my sister,
or a writer, like me. As it was, he derived endless vicarious
pleasure from his daughters’ work. Although he seemed to
embody the ideal of the self-made man, my father was not
terribly rah-rah about the bootstrap fantasy of the American
Dream; he was too aware of how tenuous his trajectory had
been, how easily his good life could have gone badly instead,
how many helping hands and lucky breaks and second chances
he had had along the way. Still, given his particular bent, having
a daughter who got paid to read books was perhaps the
consummate example of seeing to it that your kids had a better
life than your own.
In the weeks and months after my father’s death, my family
and I went through his belongings, donating whatever was
useful, getting rid of what no one would want, and divvying up
the things we loved, the things that reminded us of him. As a
result, some of my father’s books are my books now: my Dickens
and Dostoyevsky, my biology and natural history, my literary
fiction and light verse and tragedy. They came with me the
summer after he died, when my partner and I moved in together
and merged our worldly possessions. Along with the rest of the
books, they were the first things we unpacked and put away.
Although I often identify as my father’s daughter, there’s no
mistaking which half of my genome and rearing was involved in
organizing our household books. Not only does Philip Roth come
after Joseph Roth on our shelves; “The Anatomy Lesson” comes
after “American Pastoral,” and the nonfiction is subdivided into
Linnaeus-like distinctions. And yet, as my father knew, a perfect
shelving system is also inherently an imperfect one. The difficulty
isn’t all the taxonomic gray areas—whether to keep T. S. Eliot’s
criticism with his poetry, for instance, or whether Robert
McNamara’s “In Retrospect” belongs with memoirs or with books
about the Vietnam War. The difficulty is that anything that is
perfectly ordered is always threatening to become imperfect and
disorderly—especially books in a household of readers. You are
forever acquiring new ones and going back to revisit the old,
spotting some novel you’ve always intended to read and pulling
it from its designated location, discovering never-categorized
books in the office or the back seat or under the bed. You can
put some of these strays away, of course, but, collectively, they
will always spill out beyond your bookshelves, permanently
unresolved, like the remainder in a long-division problem. This is
a difficulty that goes well beyond libraries. No matter how
beautifully your life is arranged, no matter how lovingly you tend
to it, it will not stay that way forever.
I keep two pictures of my father on my desk now. One is a
photograph, taken a year or so before his death, of the two of us
walking down the street where I grew up. My dad has his hand
on my shoulder, and although in reality I am steadying him—he
was already beginning to have trouble walking—it looks as if he
is guiding me. It is the posture of a father with his daughter, as
close to timeless as any photograph could be. The other is the
picture of the Stack. Strictly speaking, of course, that one isn’t a
photograph of my father at all, and yet I can’t imagine a better
image of the kinds of things that normally defy a camera. My
father’s exuberant, expansive mind; the comic, necessary,
generous-hearted compromises of my parents’ marriage; the
origins of my own vocation—they are all there in the Stack,
aslant among the books, those other bindings. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the March 25, 2019,
issue, with the headline “The Stack.”
Kathryn Schulz joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015.
In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and a
National Magazine Award for “The Really Big One,” her story on
the seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest.