Work Song by Ivan Doig Read Free Book Online Page B

sewn leather edition, a collector’s item if I had ever seen one, spending its existence on a public shelf in a none too fastidious mining town? Once more I peered at those tiers on the mezzanine, and if I was not severely mistaken, many other handsome volumes sat there, beckoning, in bindings of royal reds and greens and blues and buffs. Curiosity got the better of me. Up the stairwell I went.
    And found myself in a book lover’s paradise.
    As though some printerly version of Midas had browsed through the shelves, priceless editions of Flaubert and Keats and Tolstoy and Goethe and Melville and Longfellow and countless other luminaries mingled on the shelves with more standard library holdings. I could not resist running my fingers along the handsomely bound spines and tooled letters of the titles. What on earth was the matron at the desk thinking, in scattering these treasures out in the open? Yet the more I looked, the more I met up with the complete works of authors, surely deliberately collected and displayed. Mystified, I was stroking the rare vellum of a Jane Austen title when a loud voice made me jump.
    “You look like a bookworm on a spree.”
    I am of medium height, but when I turned around, I was seeing straight into a white cloud of beard. Considerably above that, a snowy cowlick brushed against furrows of the forehead. In a suit that had gone out of fashion when the last century did, the man frowning down at me had considerable girth at the waist and narrowed at the chest and shoulders; like the terrain around us, he sloped.
    Caught by surprise, I had no idea what to make of this apparition confronting me amid the books. The beard was as full as that of Santa Claus, but there was no twinkle of Christmas nor any other spirit of giving in those glacial blue eyes.
    Keeping my own voice low, I responded: “Butte is rich in its library holdings, as I assume we both have discovered?”
    “Finest collection west of Chicago. Too bad the town doesn’t have the brains to match the books,” he drawled at full volume. “Quite a reader, are you? Who do you like?”
    Appropriately or not, my gaze caught on a lovely marbled copy of Great Expectations . “Dickens,” I began a whispered confession that could have gone on through legions of names. “There’s a person who could think up characters.”
    “Hah.” My partner in conversation reached farther along in the shelves of fiction. “I’ll stick with Stevenson, myself.” He fondled along the gilt-titled set of volumes from boyish adventure to phantasmagoria of shape-shifting souls. “It takes a Scotchman to know the sides of life.” Abruptly he swung around, towering over me again, and demanded loudly: “You like Kipling, or don’t you?”
    Oh, was I tempted to recite: ‘What reader’s relief is in store / When the Rudyards cease from kipling / And the Haggards ride no more.’ Instead I put a thumb up and then down, meanwhile murmuring, “His stories are splendid sleight of hand, the poetry is all thumbs.”
    “Not short of opinion, are you.” He fixed a look on me as if he had shrewdly caught me at something. “Saw you down there, pawing at Caesar. English isn’t good enough for you?”
    “Lux ex libris , ” I tried to put this absolute stranger in his place, “whatever the language on the page.”
    “If light comes from books,” he drawled back, “how come Wood-row Wilson isn’t brighter than he is?”
    That stopped me. Was I really expected to debate the intellect of the president of the United States within hearing of everyone in the building?
    Just then a couple of elderly ladies entered the Reading Room below, still chattering softly from the street. Frowning so hard the beard seemed to bristle, my companion leaned over the mezzanine railing. “Quiet!” he bellowed.
    That legendary pairing, madman and library, seemed to be coming true as I watched. All heads now were turned up toward us, the woman at the desk whipping her eyeglasses on