What happens when a person who owns books loses all her library? It can never be replaced. I know. I experienced it.

Having gone to college and graduate schools, over the years I had amassed a large set of books which I lost in a "fire." It is more complicated, but let's not go there.

I was a kid when I started to keep books that I bought - not all books, but many which had influenced me. In fact, the more I had committed a book to memory, the more likely it was that I would keep it - you would think it was the opposite, but it wasn't.

I came to know them by their spines as some people know their friends by their faces. I even had the "Matsu Decimal System" that had the virtue of not having any decimals in it, but I would look for color, shape, size, and general location and snap the book up and whip open the page and be close to where the info was that I needed and if it was a non-fiction book, there was even an index.

I lost the collection that would have filled a small U-haul truck. I lost it ten years ago. It takes time to rebuild a library and while many of the texts are the same, the covers are different. Dante, to which I referred in media girl's post used to be three paperbacks I bought in middle school. There were a couple others which were his poetry, but The Comedy was those three books with their cracked spines lovingly pressed tight to hold them together.

The replacement, a mighty hardback has the same words - Ciardi's translation - but it isn't the same. It's a stranger. My fingers jut don't know where to go to find what I need. A stranger takes my lover's place - I see another face.

Then there are the actual text books I used. First and second editions. I have learned that mint copies of these can be secured for low prices. The text book game always ratchets up the edition. Why use the third edition of Thomas' Calculus when you can get the tenth, or maybe better the ninth edition, but it has morphed beyond recognition. The beauty of the explanations has turned into book bloat. I may have hated it at the time, but it was the way is got put into my brain and hence the third edition sits along side the fifth that I got for 25 cents at St. Vincent Depaul, and the ninth at Boarders for $109 and the tenth through Amazon for what was it, $85? You see, this divine revelation only came about in the last two years and I have learned to shop and no longer go for the new books that are strangers. My Thomas' third edition was mint, mint, mint, all the way and for $10.00. A bargain which I bought two years ago on the net. And I was back in college all over again, reliving the moment when I bought the original with its paper dust cover.

Pulling books from my shelf was once like I now pull tarot cards. They just vibe beneath my fingers. I may not know what is inside, but it seems to happen when I touch the parchment.

But lost is the marginalia. The silly notes. Too much yellow highlighting. Angry comments. The restructuring of bogus sentences by scientists who love electrons more than English.

The library, as I learned, was more than the words in the books. It was the Gestalt of my education, the map of my mind, the geological layers of learning laid down like mollusks in some ancient sediment long before the Pleistocene from which my mental "phylobiology" emerged from the ooze.

Maybe it's like a divorce or even more to the point, like death. We can get a new mate or grieve over a loss, but that new reality will grown on its own. My new cast of characters that sit on my shelf are a continuation of the long gone texts. Here and there, in new shape and size, yes I will continue to rebuild, but the loss of the library was a watershed. Yet after the flood, these new books seem to extend from the extinct ones.

Waxing poetic, I suppose my little library makes no difference to the world. One thinks of the incalculable loss of the library at Alexandria and that is what makes men weep - not some books that can be replaced.

There were the rare book - not valuable - just . . . rare. For example, a school year book. Pamphlets from an exhibition of van Gogh. "Oh yes these are the ones I saw." Other rare books, too. Not valuable. Just rare. Perhaps obscure it a better word, which all come together to form something eclectic and which can no longer be captured. Like youth - lost.

Happily, I no longer hear complaints "why do you have so many booooooks. There's no wall space." It's just the price for that peace that turned out to be steeper than I ever realized.