Don’t sell your red books

“Heroes take journeys, confront dragons, and discover the treasure of their true selves.” – Carol Pearson

Years ago when my husband John had his fantastic odd little bookshop full of antique science books in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., a local Decorator to the Stars of U.S. Government came in one day looking for books—and lots of them.

Georgetown is a wealthy neighborhood in D.C. (think Ambassadors and Secretaries of State), so the prospect of a Big Sale was in the air, that Electric Moment of Possibility, that Vacation in Tuscany and College Fund and New Heat Pump all wrapped up into one.of them.”

“I’m looking for books for an important client who is redoing their house here in Georgetown,” the decorator informed John. “And I think you have just what we need!”

“Really? What’s their area of interest in the sciences?” John asked. “Oh, they’re not scientists!” he replied, laughing at the prospect. “We’re looking for books in lovely shades of red to match their new imported silk draperies: burgundy, that nice wine color that old books have, that beautiful, brightish red with gold print—along those lines.”

“But I’m wondering what kind of book they need for their collection,” John responded, quizzically, unable to grasp the full measure of the situation unfolding like a creaking and unmistakable door in front of him.

“Oh, the subject doesn’t matter at all,” the decorator replied. “But they do need to be red or in the red family, old and distinguished looking, leather bound if at all possible, no bigger than 9 inches tall, and we need 50 yards of them.

Like so much fabric. Like so much bric-a-brac. Like so many carpet remnants or white yard markers on a football field.

“And we’re willing to pay top dollar for them. I see some there in the back that would be perfect!,” he said, pointing to John’s History of Science collection, a beautiful sea of dark red on the back wall of the store.

At the time, we were knee deep into our first pregnancy, expecting Emma to arrive in a few weeks, and what he was offering would buy a lot of little tiny baby necessities, like a sweet light teal Vespa scooter on which she could ride behind me to Montessori school. But John had built his collection over many years and he loved his books for the history of ideas they represented. He couldn’t bear the thought of them being used as so much ribbon on the package of a nonreader’s living room, like so much icing on the cake of an antebellum bookcase, like so much—well, you get the idea.

John declined the generous offer, explaining why he couldn’t sell books in such a way—that to him, it wasn’t just a transaction, but something more. I’ve always loved the fact that he did that—that he cared too much about his books to sell them short. He wanted people to use and absorb the books, not merely dust them and throw them out when the draperies changed to forest green or ochre. He walked away from the Deal for the integral love of what he had and was offering to the world.

Then there was the couple who considered buying decades worth of the Journal of The Chemical Society because they were bound in a lovely burnt orange leather.

I guess sometimes we just need to walk away, no matter how deeply we need or want the Vespa—or even how deeply we want to change the world. And my most important lesson from John’s response was that we should love what we do—and I mean be truly, deeply passionate about it—enough to protect it and cherish it and offer it in the most respectful way possible, not as yardage or tonnage.

In my earliest consulting days, those scary days when you accept every gig that comes your way because the future seems overly uncertain (as opposed to the less scary times when the future just seems uncertain), I worked on developing a diversity strategy for a major health care organization, one part of which was hearing the stories of people in the organization about their experiences around diversity issues—did they feel welcomed? Included? Valued? (Short answer was no. Long answer was painful).

A largely white organization, it represented a disease that disproportionately affects people of color. The phrase I heard from people all over the country to describe the organization was “good ole’ boy network.” As I fed back the data to the CEO, he stopped me short: “You know why it’s called a ‘good old boy network?’ he fairly well sneered at me. “Because it’s good and it works.”

After I regained consciousness, I walked away.

Though I needed the money, having just started my own business, I couldn’t see simply marking time, doing work that raised the expectations of the people in the organization that change was coming—and knowing it wasn’t coming, that it was only being checked off a “to-do” list to satisfy the incoming chairman of the board who was African-American, as if this diversity “thing” would placate him. I couldn’t be the instrument of that deception, no. This sneering man was not someone I could work with, no matter how much the kids needed shoes, no matter how much I still wanted that Vespa, no matter how much Tuscany was calling my name. It made me feel dirty to participate, the dirtiness no money could erase. I had to bundle up my red books and leave.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m committed to the hard work. And I often stay where things are difficult because that’s where the work needs to be done, isn’t it? Like my big beautiful personal trainer Thor once said to me as I whined about how hard those incline sit-ups were with him lobbing a 25-pound medicine ball at my head every time I wrestled my way up to the top: “Listen, Patti, if it were easy, everybody walking around D.C. would look like me.”

Egotistical, perhaps, but very, very true.

And if diversity work were easy, as Thor taught me, wouldn’t we all be working in fantastically inclusive organizations where everyone’s ideas are sought out and valued? Are we? We’d be living in a world where the phrase “peace in the Middle East” is redundant, where hate crimes are an historical oddity rather than a daily reality. Are we? So I understand that doing the hard work is the point. Even so, to save my own sense of worth and worthiness in this world, sometimes I realize that I must walk back to myself and away from Mr. Good ‘Ole Boy. In those cases, I must offer my own library of red books to people who will embrace and love and learn from them, not merely pay for them in order to show them off.

John has a new fantastic odd little shop now, this one in our beautiful little mountain town, specializing in old maps and prints and just a few books. Just yesterday evening on the way home from the shop, he rued selling a beautiful copy of Arnheim’s Visual Thinking to a woman who, he realized later, mainly just liked the cover.

The magic is still there.

And so, now in this time of clarity, I realize that for the first time in my life, I’m passionate about my work in the world, very clear about what I will and won’t do to make a living in this world—and finally know how very much those little red books mean to me.