Adding Caro’s Book to the Collection

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I have hauled my collection of 1,500 or so books five times and nearly 3,000 miles in two years. That means it is time for an oil change, I suppose. Actually, what I hope it means is that this time I am putting these volumes up on the shelves for a very long time. So I am unpacking and placing them with even greater detail than my OCD mind generally employs. I decided to literally unbox all books, place them on the office floor and then try to categorize them in a way that makes sense to my little brain.

My Beautiful Mystery Companion wanted to know if I intended to use the Dewey Decimal System. That seems excessive, though I am an aficionado of this method of cataloging books in libraries. Few things make me happier than hunting down an obscure volume in a large university library and snaring a volume that hasn’t been checked out since Nixon got impeached. I know. I am a nerd. Besides, I think my BMC was joshing me.

Speaking of presidents, I have delivered my Father’s Day gift request to the appropriate parties. Robert Caro has just published the fourth volume of his epic biography of Lyndon Johnson. I just unpacked the first three volumes and can’t wait to dive into the next one, which covers the five years from the tail-end of the Eisenhower era to a few months after Johnson became president following Jack Kennedy’s assassination.

I can bookmark my life over the past 30 years by where I was living and working when each of the Caro volumes were published. When “The Path to Power” was published in 1982, I was running the San Augustine Rambler in Deep East Texas, more than half a lifetime ago. I have moved that particular volume at least 20 times. It has held up well, though the cover is a bit faded. In 1990, when “Means of Ascent” came out, I had just returned to Nacogdoches as managing editor of the paper there, where I had worked in college. I was still there as editor and publisher when “Master of the Senate” came out in 2002.

Ten years later, I have returned to my hometown of Longview just as “The Passage of Power” is published. I’m still writing a column each week, as I had started doing a few months before the first volume was published in 1982. It is now published online only, on this modest website. I still have a minor connection to newspapers through writing editorials on a freelance basis. But while I will always write and take pictures because it is how I am wired, my career path is changing. Exactly in what direction is still open.

Regardless, much of my reading time in June will be spent delving into the years Caro covers in “The Passage or Power.” That is the same period when I both learned to read and became interested in politics and baseball. Books and newspapers became integral parts of my life, windows into the larger world beyond Allenstown, N.H. I can’t imagine a world without either of them, though increasingly these days, like many people, I read nearly all newspapers online.

When I finally get all the books unboxed and set out on the floor, I plan to take a cellphone photo for Connor, my young nephew by marriage. He just turned seven and is a voracious reader. My BMC and I took him to a bookstore a few weeks ago and let him pick out two books. He sat down in the aisle to begin reading one of them. I snapped a photo of him and sent it to his dad, who replied via text, “That makes me happy.”

It makes me happy, too, to see a young child taking such a keen interest in written words and not just stuff on a screen. I bet Connor will get a kick out of seeing that sea of books on the floor.

Robert Caro is 75 years old and plans to publish the final volume of the Johnson biography within two to three years. I figure he is again being overly optimistic on meeting that deadline, though I’m sure advancing age is beginning to be a concern. I will buy that volume as well and plan to save a spot for it up on the shelf.

Surely I will have finished putting up all the books by then.

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