He Lost All His Books in the Fire

On 1/20/19, I wrote about going through the books in my home, and giving a few bags full of books to my local library for its Friends of the Library book sale/fundraiser. I was recently reminded that I was fortunate to be able to consider carefully which of my many books I would relinquish, and make my own decisions about when to do so. The journalist Jaime O’Neill was not so lucky. As he wrote in the 1/6/19 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook, his house in Butte County, California, was destroyed by the horrific wildfires of November 2018, and one of the losses he most mourns is the complete destruction of his personal library of about 2,000 volumes. (Interestingly, many of these books were bought at his local library’s book sales, institutions –- both local libraries and their book sales to raise money for the libraries -- of which I am a great fan.) He writes of books used for long-ago college classes, newly purchased books, books he was in the process of reading when the fire forced him and his wife to evacuate, books he and his wife had given each other, signed editions, books in their closet intended for Christmas gifts for their daughters. O’Neill acknowledges that the loss of his books is “a long way from the worst of losses” suffered during the fires. But for him, the loss is very painful. “Nearly every book title evoked a memory, either of reading or of acquisition. Some reminded me of things I know, and the source of a particular shard of knowledge. Some of them contained inscriptions from the people who had given them to me, and some of those people are now gone, too.” Anyone who loves books, and especially their own treasured volumes, cannot help but ache with sympathy for O’Neill’s loss of his precious books and all that they meant to him.