Give Thanks...A Well-Stocked Wall

 I stood in a friends home office recently and admired his wall. The wall contained no painting, or photograph, or, heaven-forbid, a flat-screen TV. No, his wall contained books...best-sellers, scriptures, works of fiction, motivational books, financial books, classics.

A well-stocked wall.

I have a home office. I have a bookshelf. Actually, it's more like basic shelving that contains books. Most of the books in my office are personal journals...over seventy.

But my office wall isn't what I saw earlier. Scanning his titles I realized, the wall of books tells me so much about the man who assembled them. From the selections I know what he deems important, what he considers art, what aspects of his life he feels need improving, what he enjoys reading for fun. It's a map, a guide to a personality...to a soul.

I noticed several rare editions, but a majority of the works can be found in your local bookstore, or even second-hand or thrift store. Point is, for relatively little money (especially compared to the amount of knowledge contained therein...), you can create a well-stocked wall for yourself. Be patient, take your time, a book here, a classic there, books to improve yourself, books for fun. In time, your wall will become more just a collection of works. It will transform into a resource, a reference, a sanctuary. 

I'm thankful we live in a society that allows us to gather and keep books. Some societies don't. I'm thankful I was able to check out his collection. I'm thankful for his friendship and his library helped create the man he is today. I'm thankful for well-stocked walls wherever they may be.

A Wall Of Books...

There's a lot you can tell about someone by just walking into the front room of their home. There's probably people whose job it is to study stuff like that. A room too clean means something, too messy means something else. A room full of dead animals on the walls, or covered in superhero posters, all mean something. Yesterday I walked into a house where one of the four walls was covered, floor to ceiling, with books.

That says a lot about the people who live there.

We have a library in our home, the biggest collection of books is in the loft where we school the kids, or used to until it became a shrine to Legos. There are bookshelves in each of the kids's bedrooms, but in our front room, we don't have a wall of books. Our house doesn't really lend itself to a wall of books, but it would cool is we could.

I did a little snooping in the wall of books, under their supervision, of course. I always like seeing what books people have (or don't have...) in their libraries. They had a system with kids and YA books in their own areas, classics in another area, Shakespeare in yet another. Makes it easy for someone like me who has never seen the collection to find something excellent to read.

You can tell a lot about a person by just walking into their front room. And if they have a wall of books, you don't need to be a scientist to know what kind of people they are.