Collections are made of intentional exclusions and inclusions, but sometimes books are stolen, lost, or slotted onto shelves at random without licence or record. The whole is defined both by what it contains and by what falls outside of it — or down the stairs after a piano lesson.
One night last winter, on our way to my children’s music class, I thought I’d be clever by dropping into the Lillian H. Smith Branch of the Toronto Public Library to pick up some holds. Later, the books I’d borrowed went flying onto the sidewalk as I lumbered down the stairs of the piano studio with our wagon. I scooped them up, tossed them in with the children, and hustled everyone home, only to realize when we’d fed the kids and put them to bed — and I was ready to have a sit and a drink and a meal of my own — that one of the loans was missing. Tired and hungry, I headed back out into the night to retrace my steps and scour the dark and empty streets for a paperback that didn’t appear...
Jessica Duffin Wolfe is a professor of digital communications and journalism at Humber College, in Toronto. She wrote The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Literature and Illness, out this month.
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