Bookmark Catalogue 2021 WEBSM

AUTHOR PROFILE
A message from
Richard
Lemm
Bookmark Charlottetown’s
2021 Bookstore Ambassador
PHOTO: LEE ELLEN POTTIE
In my great-grandmother’s settler home sheltered by venerable maples, cedars, and firs, there was no
electricity, but there were shelves of old hardbound books and kerosene lamps to read by. I would select
a book for its colour and the magic of a gold-embossed name and title on the spine. Burgundy, Charles
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. Forest green, James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans. Blue-violet,
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women. Opening a book, I would inhale its scent: dried mushrooms from the
woods, or breadcrusts for the birds. With Great-grandma in her rocking chair throne, I held the book like an
ancient Egyptian scribe with a scroll, lifting the charmed words from the page with my voice into the lamplit
air, turning each leaf with reverence. Closing the book, I drew night and enchanted sleep around the world
therein, until I next broke its spell and that world resumed. Those shelves with so many worlds waiting for
me, their Merlin.
Many years later, discussing E-readers with Jesse, a friend and former student, he told me that his back-tothe-lander
parents always left books lying around in their rural PEI home. They never urged or nudged him
to read any. One day, age ten, Jesse picked up a book on the coffee table. Moby Dick. He began reading. And
kept on reading. I understood very little, he said, though I liked the whale, but I read the whole book and
loved it. That would not have happened, he said, with an E-reader. He has been reading books ever since.
When I moved permanently to Canada in the late 1960s, with no job, I told my partner I wanted to work in
a bookstore. Fat chance of that, she said. I lucked out. The illustrious Duthie Books was opening its flagship
store in downtown Vancouver and needed extra hands to schlepp and shelve hundreds of cartons of books. I
worked my derriere off and was rewarded with a full-time position. For the next few years, I was surrounded
by thousands of worlds and the joy of helping other Merlins select their waiting realms.
When my wife and I travel, we carry a small suitcase filled with books from The Bookmark in Charlottetown.
At our destinations, people with digital tablets try to convince us we would be much better off with one
lightweight device holding a million volumes. No, we tell them, we would be impoverished and bereft.
We want the eager delight of entering our bookstore, with a list, and to be surprised. We want the deep
pleasure of speaking with book-loving friends we encounter there and with the bibliophilic wizards who
own and manage the store. We want to intone, in our minds, like Hermione, the spells on the spines. Feel the
alchemy of book and hands coming together. The camaraderie with Dan and Marlene and Lori as they hand
us these scrolls,
We need to see our grandchildren, at our bookshelves, their eyes grazing, hands reaching, worlds and minds
about to awaken.
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