The Painted Prayerbook

Okay, maybe it’s true that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I think it’s fair to say that at a literal level, if we’re talking about actual books and not metaphorically applying the aphorism to people, a compelling face often provides a good suggestion about what the inside holds. A comely cover, or sometimes just an appealing spine, is almost always the first thing that prompts me to pull an unfamiliar book off the shelf. While a “good cover-to-good contents” correlation may not always hold true, I’ve learned it’s a better than decent bet that if the face of a book catches my attention, its innards will be worth a gander as well.

I’m posting this from my parents’ home, where books—and a supply of intriguing book covers—abound. I’ve been hanging out here over the Thanksgiving weekend. This holiday is always a big reunion time for the Richardson relations. These past few days of paddling around the gene pool have included the annual Thanksgiving feast that nearly everyone in our hometown comes to, along with lots of out-of-town folks who come back for the festivities. We normally have our noontime chowdown in the community park, but this year, for only the second time in the feast’s half-century history, we got rained out of the park. Fortuitously, the local United Methodist congregation completed the construction of a fellowship hall earlier this year (its first building project in almost 100 years), and, while eating pecan pie isn’t quite the same indoors as under sunny skies, it was another splendid gathering.

I’ve lingered with my folks in Gainesville, grateful for the chance to spend more time with family and friends over the weekend and to catch up on my sleep. I’ve been poking around my parents’ bookshelves while I’ve been here. Many of the books were part of the landscape when I was growing up; I imagine lots of them arrived in the magical book boxes I wrote about previously. This weekend I pulled out some books whose spines had caught my eye on earlier visits. They contain collections of poems by Ogden Nash, the 20th century poet known for his agile handling of light verse. I first became acquainted with him through some of his short poems that I’ve heard my Dad recite, such as his “Reflection on Babies.” (“A bit of talcum/Is always walcum.”) Nash also brought us “Further Reflection on Parsley” (“Parsley/Is Garsley.”) and “The Cow” (“The cow is of the bovine ilk; One end is moo, the other, milk.”) If you know only one Ogden Nash poem, it’s probably this one, which occasionally gets attributed to Dorothy Parker:

Reflections on Ice-Breaking

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.

The Nash books on my parents’ shelf were first published in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and there’s something about their simply designed covers that my eye finds really pleasing. Even their spines, cozied up together on the shelf, form an appealing line. When I pulled out one of the volumes on this visit, I was intrigued to see that the jackets were designed by Maurice Sendak. It was one of those occasions where I could see it once I knew it; the images are pretty different from his other work such as we find in his famous book Where the Wild Things Are, but it’s certainly kin.

I haven’t spent enough time with the appealingly attired Ogden Nash books to know whether they bear out my general rule that a good cover suggests good innards (although they did provide some enjoyable recitation and conversation at the dinner table tonight). But I’ve enjoyed this confirmation of what good covers can do for good books (and sometimes not-so-good ones), and how books are more than just words slapped on pages sandwiched between two boards. Some books are presences over time, part of the landscape that helps orient us in this world; they offer a visual feast that can sustain us even if we only infrequently partake of what they contain.

This holiday weekend, I give thanks for that.