A Hankering for Bookends

I hadn’t thought of bookends for years but, for some unknown reason, they came flooding into my memory today.

The ones I had were china with dogs on them and they guarded my precious books in the various houses that we lived in. Once the bookends and my books were in my room, as well as a green bedspread that I still have somewhere in the house here,  I felt I was where I should be.

While the bookends were very precious, having been given to me by my grandmother, Jean, one Christmas when I was about 7, I gave them a rough time over the years expecting them to hold firm on the edges of bedroom mantelpieces that were part of the bedrooms of bank houses that we lived in. (Yes, there were fireplaces in the bedrooms of the bank houses ~ we were never allowed to light fires in them, though. I wish now that I’d lit at least one fire in all those years but …)

I have spent the last while searching for images of bookends that were like mine and this pair are the nearest match I can find:

Photo: http://www.etsy.com

My love of bookends always stood in stark contrast to my feelings about book endings. I couldn’t but be a young reader, given the family I grew up in. I was the youngest and the others always had their heads stuck in books. Readie-bones, readie bones … I would nag and nag until one of them eventually put their book down and played with me.

But, deep down, I knew what it was to love reading and to become immersed in the worlds of books like Little Women, What Katy Did, The Nancy Drew Series, anything written by Enid Blyton ….. I would read the same books over and over and over again and I never wanted them to end. In so many ways, it was as if I wanted books to be circular in the same way that I wanted my bookends to somehow manage to hold the ever-increasing row of books on those mantlepieces without  ever falling and breaking into smithereens. .

The bookends did their best to survive but eventually I pushed them too far ~ even Dad’s strongest glue couldn’t fix them.

Like many a dog owner, who has lost a dog, I couldn’t face having new bookends as the pair I’d had seemed to be irreplaceable and I couldn’t see that maybe I would fall in love with a new pair in a different kind of way as I watched them doing their work from my comfy bed with the green bedspread.

I wonder is it time to think about getting a new pair or is it too late?