Bookshelves Inspire a Builder

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

January 19, 1964

   LAST FEBRUARY this correspondent's adult education course in woodworking was ground into the sawdust because of a fall on the ice.  I had paid more than $10 for lumber and fittings and was nicely launched on some bookshelves when I broke an arm and had to give up.  I cannot use power tools with one hand.  Without help, I barely can use them with two.

   But incapacity did not remove the need for more book space.  Books we hadn't seen for years--some of them borrowed, I was to discover--were moldering away in dark corners for lack of display room.  We didn't actually know what books we had.  Some were here, some there.  Inventory was all but impossible.

   FOR 11 MONTHS my 10 bucks worth of pine, the lumber I had planned to convert into a facility for my basement study, lay in the attic.  Then, after the holiday madness was over and the numbness had subsided, I thought of that costly jag of timber and closed in on the stuff.

   Had the work been done under the eye of the woodworking instructor I might not have been given an "A."  Progress was amazingly swift, however, probably because of a certain casualness about measurements and to some extent because my wife kept her distance.

   NORMALLY at the first swing of the hammer she smells trouble and wonders what I'm doing.  This time she wasn't alert to what was going on until near the finish.  I fooled her by using screws rather than nails.  But even the best of us can't avoid occasional pounding.  If hammers weren't needed they wouldn't be made.

   When the time finally came to pound, my wife warned me that the blows were cracking the upstairs plaster.  But subsequent search, just as I suspected, revealed no cracks.  Women automatically subscribe to what the Pentagon terms the strategy of overkill.

   SUBJECT to a few minor refinements, the bookshelves are now finished and hanging from the rafters.  To those who might find esthetic or artistic fault, I can say only this: the installation fulfills its main function.  It holds a heap of books.

   The volumes formerly piled on the desk are in it.  So are the books which had graced a couple of shelves above the desk--shelves originally used for paint, varnish, putty, nails and other do-it-yourself torments.  I'm now assiduously bird-dogging books from attic corners and putting them on the new shelves.

   I'M ALSO thrilled.  Such triumphs are small, of course, to men of broad gauge and accomplishment, but they can give an ordinary life a new destiny and purpose.  I told my son and wife this and they seemed amused.  They smiled.

   I said I was exhilarated to the point where I might buy a full line of power tools and become a sure-enough builder of whatever needed building.

   Dormant skills might flower.  A new craftsman might be born, a sleeping artisan awakened.

   Wife and son kept on smiling.

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