Friends of the Libraries' Guest Columnist Features My life with books By Richard Purdy July 10, 2004 The Athens Messenger

I felt an affinity for reading as a source of mental pleasure from the very beginning. In elementary school, the activity of going to the school library did not feel like a chore or obligation, but a source of recreation. There I felt most drawn to the biographies that in those days they wrote for young people. In discovering the lives of others, I acquired the ability to visualize what I might accomplish in my own life.

Later in life, I enlisted in the Navy to experience the greater world and see what I might discover about my own potential. During the long stretches at sea, between the bursts of activity expected of us, I found books once again sustaining the hunger of my intellect and imagination. At that time, I read several books a week -- a constructive way to resist the doldrums! Especially then, in the confines of a ship, I consciously realized that the ability to enjoy a book enabled the mind to go where it pleased. With a book, the mind need never feel trapped or fixated on a limited state of conditions. The open pages of a book could serve as a set of wings to attain new vantage points on reality.

Now, after owning a bookstore for some 20 years, I am still awestruck by the unending abundance of books. The stimulus to the literate faculty of the brain and the strengthening of mind it encourages need never end. I have enjoyed the ability, which comes with running a bookstore, to find and introduce new works by favorite authors or on favorite subjects to the customers I've gotten to know. Somehow, facilitating the reading pleasure or hunger for knowledge in my customers never ceases to fulfill me. If there is a reason beyond just making a living from the book business, it is this bibliotherapy that the interested bookstore owner practices every day.

Looking at the broader society beyond my life and business, I have noticed repeatedly that those who make reading an important part of their life tend to be more open to diverse ideas. Readers have more ideas at their disposal to help solve the problems that arise in life. I am happy to see that my little daughter has already acquired the cultural instinct for reading, and it grows day by day. She, like myself, and my customers, will join the ranks of those who believe that books and reading represent important artifacts and behaviors of a democratic society.

Richard Purdy is co-owner of The Little Professor Book Center in Athens. The Friends of the Libraries at Ohio University sponsors this monthly feature.