I find plenty of news in old books

When my wife and I hired some painters to freshen up several rooms of our home, one of the men who showed up was surprised by what he found.

“This guy is old school,” he whispered to his friend, pointing to the full bookshelves in our family study. “There are books everywhere.”   

I am, I have to admit, an old-school reader, with tastes that lean toward the antique.  

Put simply, I love old books, which puts me in the company of a long line of readers who often prefer them. 

“I am not much taken by the new books,” Michel de Montaigne declared in the 16th century. “The old ones seem to have more meat and sinew.” That quote is in a cheap vintage copy of his essays that I picked up in 1986, the start of my adventures in secondhand literature.

Alone in a new city to take my first daily newspaper job, I was feeling vaguely anxious as I dipped into a used bookstore to soothe my mind. The musty shelves, richly redolent of the past, quickly calmed me. One of the occupational hazards of journalism, my chosen profession, is an itch to stay on top of the Next Big Thing. With their cracked spines and yellowed pages, the tattered titles in the shop usefully pointed me toward the longer view. “No need to get too worked up over today’s fad or headline,” they seemed to say. “There is not much new under the sun.”

The words I’ve found in the old books I’ve bought routinely prove the point. Montaigne’s laments about overheated politics still ring true, as does his confession about overindulging his pets. “I cannot refuse to romp with my dog,” Montaigne tells us, “even though he invites me at the most inopportune time.” 

In my single years, stung by the thought that just about everyone else was paired and happy, I bought a dog-eared paperback of Charles Lamb’s writings from nearly two centuries ago just to enjoy his eye-rolling essay “A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behavior of Married People.”

Lamb didn’t begrudge spouses their happiness, but he grumbled that “they perk it up in the faces of us single people so shamelessly.”

These days, despite 27 years of happy – though I hope not ostentatiously happy – marriage and two healthy grown children, I can still get a little down, like anyone who reads the news. My venerable volume of the grandly Elizabethan Francis Bacon’s essays is always a ready antidote: “Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes,” Bacon wrote, and “adversity not without many comforts and hope.”

For me, that comfort and hope often come from a secondhand book. Sometimes, what the previous owners have scribbled in the margins is at least as edifying as what the authors have to say. 

In my worn copy of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” an earlier reader had frequently penciled in “integrity” to describe Woolf’s vision. With so many sentences annotated by applause, I felt that my own enthusiasm for the book had been affirmed.

My frayed edition of Joseph Addison’s 18th-century essays has “good” written in lovely cursive near a paragraph in which Addison argues that reading deeply from the past can be at least as instructive as following the day’s news. Don’t worry, he adds, about missing out on the latest gossip. “All matters of fact, which a man did not know before, are news to him,” he writes, regardless of when the facts were minted. That’s reason enough, I guess, to pull Addison from the shelf again and give him another go.

That’s the thing about old books: Their jackets might be stained and their chapters brittle. But at their best, they draw me in for the same reason they beckoned other eyes before mine. They provide an opportunity, within their weathered pages, to catch up on news that never fades.