House of books & dreams
Imagine a little house—or, rather, more properly, a two-story reading room—containing thousands of books. Imagine this house on the outskirts of Killaloe, a rural village of six hundred in northern Ontario.
Amazing.
I had the pleasure of visiting “Love’s Healing Reading Room” with authors Merilyn Simonds and Wayne Grady last week. We quickly lost ourselves in exploring this eclectic library, books collected by Dr. George Linn over his all-too-short lifetime.
Two books that “caught my fancy” (I love that expression*) were A Cordiall Water by MFK Fisher—
—and Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book.
Treasures.
The quote below is from a blog post Merilyn Simonds wrote about the reading room, months before we visited it:
“Over [Dr. Linn’s] lifetime, he collected 60,000 books, which he shelved in his house and in his office. When he died, all the books were shipped to a two-storey house built specifically to house them in the small village where he had planned to retire. The house is furnished with bookshelves, squishy chairs and couches, and a wood stove for winter. A sign by the perpetually unlocked front door asks readers to leave their electronic devices in the bowl by the entrance and to enjoy the books within the reading room, returning them to the shelves for the pleasure of others.”
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fantsy “inclination, liking,” contraction of fantasy. It took the older and longer word’s sense of “inclination, whim, desire.”
That describes perfectly the feeling of discovering such books.
