Book Lending as Spiritual Formation

Why won't people just bring back our books?

My new home library kit has a little date stamp with a tiny ink pad, due date cards and holders with adhesive to stick into the back of books that I might lend out, if I think I will get them back.

Joel from church gave me this system — in its tiny perfect box — one Sunday morning.

“You know me so well,” I said, or something like that.

Joel reminded me I had recently given him my Why Don’t People Return Books? speech at an afternoon party following the baptism of a little baby friend of ours. Joel saw me. He understood.

I do not lack books. But I also don’t want to give the best ones away forever, unless I choose. If so, I will say: “Keep it. I don’t want this book back.”

What I usually say, though, and quite clearly, is: “You can borrow it if you want, but I do want it back.”

Then, I look them straight in the eye, like my dad taught me, and ask: “Are you the kind of person who gives books back?”

And they will always say, “Yes.” And even, “Absolutely.”

Then they jump into their getaway car.

A book collection — because that’s what some of us feel we are creating in our shelves, on our tables and in those little piles in the corners — is one of the only collections that people can walk off with bits from and forget they have them, or lose them, or can’t remember where they got them if they find them, or just decide that it doesn’t really matter. Those who borrow forever would never have gotten away with taking one of my dad’s beer mugs from where his collection hung off wooden pegs on our basement ceiling. (This is too hard to explain.) Or one of my mother’s dainty blue dessert plates that she collected.

She would have hunted those plates down.

I hunt my books down. (Do you? I have a poll down below…)

This makes me feel bad, look bad, sound bad, and act bad, but more on that in a second.

Are we meant to be book saints content to know our books are being enjoyed out there somewhere? We’re saving people money and a trip to the book store. Yes, we’re being generous in a flourishing, literary kind of way. We’re contributing to someone else’s reading, even if our book is under the seat of the getaway car, or being gnawed on by a baby (cute, yes, yes, very cute), crushed in the bottom of a bag or already given to someone else in the great book pass-on-a-thon.

Our friend is in their bedroom holding up our beloved book and saying, “Honey, where did this come from?”

“I have no idea,” is the answer.

Goodbye book.

Once I handed over a stack of favourites to a reader who did not understand what she was getting herself into.

I began the swearing in ceremony.

“Do you, Rachel, agree to return these books?”

“I do,” she said, laughing a bit nervously.

And she did. But I didn’t think she did so I asked for my books back when some time had passed. She did sweeps of her house and couldn’t find them, because of course they were at my house, already returned, which she had already told me, in a tentative voice. Terrified (I can only assume) she bought me all new books which arrived in a big pile in the mail, because we lived in different towns. I felt embarrassed in that moment that she had felt she needed to replace them (I told her not to!); and that was even before I discovered that she had been right, she had already returned them.

I can’t express deeply enough, now, looking back, how much I wish I hadn’t gone all Book Sheriff with sweet Rachel.

Very soon, of course, I found my actual, original books. I turned hot and cold. I cackled at my closet door, where they were piled on a shelf. I sweated bullets. “Don’t tell her,” a lesser me whispered in my own ear. “She thinks she didn’t return them because, Sherriff, that’s what you made her think.”

I called her. I told her. We laughed. Ha ha ha.

I bought her a stack of more and different books to replace the books she bought to replace my books (so, now I had two copies of each of the books), and then I told her let’s just agree to wrap things up there. We must have each been in it for almost a hundred dollars by then.

This is an extreme example of all that can go wrong in book lending.

Book borrowers, you need to know the book lenders talk and compare horror stories. Especially if they’re writers. I just came back from a week long intense experience with other writers and this came up a couple of times in conversation.

As I write, I myself have two borrowed books, one from Rob and one from Margo, married lenders. Understanding the minefields, I don’t often borrow. But, not to sound sanctimonious or anything, I do know where those borrowed books are and where their true home is, and off they soon will go. What I don’t know for sure is how many of my books, or I hate to think of it, Brent’s books are still out there in the world, maybe doing good or maybe doing nothing at all. Come home my little friends.