As a girl, I remember sitting in my grandmother’s living room poring over old Encyclopedia Brittanicas, yellowed with age, dog-eared with curiosity by my cousins and aunts before me. The encyclopedias were on the bottom shelf; above them, hard-back novels in all shapes and sizes, some with fraying bindings, and well-worn paperbacks, bent and unbent, all creating, in this tiny room in the Midwest, a world of endless possibilities and adventure that could be unveiled by simply turning a page.

My love of books and reading traces back to that time, even before it. And it was at a very young age that I remember imagining my own future home with one single, requisite feature – a wall full of books.

As I type this right now, that wall is directly behind me. While I work at my desk each day, online, in a world where the printed tome is becoming more and more of an artifact, my love of these physical book remains, always giving me a sense of calm.

I’m not afraid of the era upon us, in which laptops and Kindles and handhelds are fast-becoming be the primary devices on which people consume words of all kinds, but I will never lose my affection for, and romantic notion of a library – home, or public – that was instilled in me in my youth.

Before I go to bed tonight, I might reach for a book of poetry on the top shelf, one that my uncle gifted me from his collection. I might open it to my favorite poem, trace my fingers across the textured pages, even inhale the slightly musty scent of the leather-bound object in my hand that has survived 40 or more years.

And if I do, as I’ve done many nights before, I will be quickly taken back to the homes of my childhood, the comforts of the objects that surrounded me, and the thousand adventures I embarked on without ever leaving my dear Grandma’s.

[Main Image: Ozyman via Flickr]