The Books for Walls Project: Herstory History Yourstory: How the Project Began

The Books for Walls Project is inspired by many lives woven together by books and stories. We hope that the following stories and our little movie will give you a little insight.

(Her)story:

The Four of Us homeschool. While the world and technology spin wildly out in the big old world, it's rather slow and quiet around here. The Books for Walls Project is an effort to learn about the internet while talking about something we love: books. All the while supporting literacy and libraries.

Through this experience we hope to learn more about why many of us keep books and what we think about these precious treasures. We hope to use technology to help reconnect us --in old fashioned ways-- like sharing stories.

The project began, as many stories do, with a man and a woman who fell in love. In the beginning T he Mom only had a few boxes of books and she shared them with The Dad who became a voracious* reader later in life (back then he liked to read, now he loves to read.) The Big Sister and Little Sister grew up in a house of books and learned to love them, almost from day one.

(Updated May 5, 2011) Many people ask us "why Books for Walls?" Books for Walls represents a grand idea of a life filled with books, so full they line the walls of a home. Within those walls of books people gather to talk. Even though wildly different the people gather and share ideas and poetry and books. The Mom wanted to share that kind of experience with The Sisters, some people call that experience a "Salon." During a particularly long winter we brainstormed about creating a blog or website where people could share their favorite books and stories. By springtime as the flowers began to bloom, so did our idea --and thankfully Books for Walls Project continues to grow and change. And while certainly there might be more obvious names for the Project --Books for Walls although a little mysterious, fits, it is a story waiting to be told. Want to hear more about it? Email us, we love sharing stories!

We all adore the idea of learning about people through the books they love and learning about books from the people who love them. You'll learn more about The Four of Us through the books we share with you here at The Books for Walls Project.

(*Note that many words throughout the blog will be linked to their definitions. For fun and to use one of the wonderful tools on the Internet, but we still love our big, heavy Oxford Dictionary the best.)

(His)story:

While I (The Mom) only met Max Brill once or twice, I feel as if I know him. I could certainly tell you his story myself. Instead, I will leave that to my father's words, who can tell you "the Max Story" first hand. My father is the man who originally thought to call Max "Books for Walls." That title and the poem which it inspired, well, they are good. And good things are meant to be shared. Here is the story written by my Dad, The Poet:

I met Max Brill at a wedding reception for the son of a man with whom our wives worked. Often at such tables occupied by a mix of strangers, multiple conversations would develop. But Max had a way of helping us all listen to each other, and soon there was one conversation, and each person who spoke was heard. It was a rare experience of a lot more listening going on than speaking. The next day Kathy and I accepted Max’s invitation to join him and Mary at a nearby Flea Market. And I remember that Max seemed to enjoy listening to me. He was old enough to be my dad, but he seemed to think that I was worth listening to. There was something healing in that. I found his company very good for me.

Max invited Kathy and me to join him and Mary at their home for “gnosh” the following weekend, where we met a third couple and enjoyed lochs and bagels with mimosas, and again shared a conversation of reverent attentiveness to each other. At one point, I noticed Max seeming to lose focus on us, to look around the room. He was sitting in a rocker of bent willow wood covered with a lamb’s wool hide, next to a rustic fireplace. He silently rose, walked to one of the bookshelves lining all of the walls, pulled out a handful of books with his right hand, then with his left hand removed one book from a row hidden behind them. The bookcases were two books thick! He placed the first books back, then returned to his chair and resumed looking at each of us as we spoke, while he leafed casually through the book.

My curiosity with his alternating attention was soon satisfied when in a break of conversation, he proclaimed, “I have a poem!” He read Kipling’s “The Betrothed”, a humorous and insightful reflection on the joy and cost of love, the balance of freedom and sacrifice. The room erupted with laughter at the penultimate line in the poem in which Kipling makes the decision whether to marry Maggie despite her prohibition of his smoking his cigars: “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.” Amid our laughter, Max closed the book, silently rose, walked to that bookshelf, pulled out the handful of books with his right hand, then with his left hand replaced the book of Kipling poems from its place behind them. He turned and smiled with twinkling eyes at his Mary, who he had married late in life, and I wondered whether somewhere in the house was an old box of cheroots.