Provenance

I am a book person, and to book people, the word "provenance" has special meaning. Provenance refers to a book's particular story, its connections to its previous owners and its special relevance as an artifact because of what it meant to the people who have handled it.

For example, I recently read a story about Umberto Eco, the brilliant academic, author, and bibliophile who became famous with has first novel, "The Name of the Rose," in which a monk is murdered by poisoning. The monk had a habit of licking his fingers when he turned the pages in a book, so his murderer put poison on the pages of a book. Eco got the idea for this weird means of murder from a nasty old paperback he bought for 70 cents in a secondhand bookshop. The book had gunky pages that were stuck to one another, and Eco was so disgusted that he had the thought that someone could get sick or die from handling the book. Then the thought occurred to him that a book could be used as a murder weapon. The rest is history. And that little paperback, which was once worthless, is now a valuable and treasured part of literary history. That's provenance.

I suppose one day I will die and someone will cart my many books to the Goodwill. That's fine by me, as long as they get to someone who might read them. At the same time, my books have provenance, too. I wish I could let it be known to whoever makes the decisions about my books one day that these books have stories beyond the ones contained on their pages.

For example, I have my great-grandfather's set of the Harvard Classics, the five-foot shelf of over 50 volumes of the world's greatest literary works. I use them, too. I've read fairy tales to my children from them, my father read the works of a Quaker abolitionist from his grandfather's set when he visited me once, I have little markers from things I've quoted popping out of the tops of the volumes. Frederic Attwood gave them to his son, William Attwood, my grandfather. Long after his death, my grandmother let me have them. They were printed in 1909. My little girl was born over a hundred years later. From time to time she sits on my lap so that I can read the original Cinderella story to her. They are more than books to me.

I also have a set of Brittanica Great Books, the other big collection of the best writing human beings have produced. The family of Rev. Torrence Maxey gave them to me from his library after he passed away. Torrence Maxey was an amazing man--a United Methodist pastor and District Superintendent who had served as a chaplain in combat during the Korean War. During the Civil Rights Movement, Superintendent Torrence Maxey once went uninvited to a church meeting in which the congregation was voting to leave the denomination because they wished to exclude African-Americans. He informed them that they had no authority to make such a choice. They physically threw him out of the meeting. The ensuing legal battle went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which supported what Rev. Maxey said to them in the beginning. That case affirmed that church buildings could not go with a congregation when they left the denomination and held the Methodist Church together through the battles over racial issues. Appropriately, I also have Rev. Maxey's six volume Sandburg biography of Abraham Lincoln.

One day I got a call from the widow of another pastor, Bob Beckley, who had spent most of his career serving a number of roles at Huntingdon College. She told me that he had left quite a few books and that he would have ben pleased if someone would take them who could appreciate them. When I went to her home, she took me to his upstairs study, which was packed with several thousand fine volumes. I didn't want to be greedy, but I also didn't want to disappoint her, so I limited myself to taking about a hundred of the things I found most useful. Only later, I realized that several were signed, including signed copies of books by Reinhold Niebuhr and Harry Emerson Fosdick.

I especially treasure books given to me by perhaps the holiest man I've known closely, Bishop Paul Duffey. He gave me his set of Interpreter's Bible Commentaries. They are underlined and annotated throughout, a sign of his deep engagement with scripture and his sincere life-long efforts to live what the Bible teaches. He also gave me a set of commentaries that were given to him by his student appointment when he graduated from seminary. I had a few others that had belonged to Bishop Duffey's mother, Bible Study books she had used in a class at Montgomery First UMC. I gave those to David Saliba to thank him for officiating my daughter's wedding. I couldn't think of anything more precious to offer him and anything less would have seemed cheap for the gratitude I felt to my brother for being a part of that holy and happy day. That's provenance.

I have books my grandfather gave me, too. When I was a little boy, he would ship me cases of things he had read when he was a little boy himself. Some of them have his name written in the front covers in little boy script. The Penrod books, Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Kidnapped. I learned to love to read from the same books that hooked my beloved grandfather.

I have my mother's Bible. When I was a teenager, she took me out to eat one day. She slid a worn out, underlined, highlighted, falling apart Bible to me. She said, "If I had made different choices in my life, I might have been able to give you things I wasn't able to give you. But because of the choices I made, I am able to give you this instead." I have many Bibles, but this one is the most precious, because this one represents the costly and precious nature of God's Word.

For the last several years, Rev. Al Harbour has been slowly bequeathing major parts of his enormous ministry library to me. His books, too, are ragged, underlined, loved and used. He has given me countless books by modern spiritual gants like Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. They give testament to his deep connection to God. They encourage me to dig deeper into prayer. They always remind me of Al, our friendship across generations, and the partnership we share in the Gospel that spans decades.

I have books signed by my former professors and others who came through while I was in school--Barbara Brown Taylor, Walter Brueggemann, Gail O'Day, Jaroslav Pelikan, Luke Timothy Johnson, President Jimmy Carter, Roberta Bondi, lots more. I always felt a bit awkward asking my teachers to sign their books, but they were always gracious and usually a little embarrassed to be asked. I'm so glad I got them signed anyway.

I have thousands of books and hundreds of stories. I have Rev. Bob Calvert's 19th century Book of Ritual from the M.E. Church. I have a shelf of books written by my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and my mother. I have the copy of "Black Like Me" my father gave me when I was a teenager, a constant reminder of the family heritage of commitment to racial justice he passed to me and I passed to my children.

I have books whose provenance is about my own life story--for example, my New Interpreter's Bible Commentaries, which I bought semester by semester when I was a dirt poor student pastor. I've used them for teaching and preaching ever since, ever mindful of how much they cost me when I used scholarship money each term to buy one volume at a time. Travel books from life-changing trips. My stacks of tattered and marked Bibles.

Maybe someone will care enough about the books to hear the stories attached to them, and maybe someone will want to preserve them in some way. It's very doubtful. Lord knows, my wife would love to never move them again. What "provenance" really means is that the people, relationships, and stories associated with the objects are the source of true treasure, not the objects themselves. So I take heart knowing that what is truly precious about my books can never be taken away, even when they and I are long gone.