My Father’s Books

My father died two years ago, suddenly but not unexpectedly: he was six weeks short of 84. When, a few months later, my mother decided to move in with one of my two sisters and her family, we siblings faced a problem many children of literate members of that generation face, namely, what to do with my father’s books.

It is both a logistical and emotional problem. At his death my father had 652 books. (How we know so exactly I’ll get to in a moment.) He’d had hundreds more but had done a substantial culling of his own several years earlier when he and my mother had moved from our childhood home in Montreal, the city where I still live, to an apartment in Ottawa, where my sisters are. My own bookshelves had benefited from several dozen volumes, some originally owned by my grandfathers and inherited by my father when they died. But my father still had a wallful and more. And his children’s shelves had largely reached their capacity (certainly in the minds of their...