FOR THOSE PEOPLE who find themselves out of sorts as autumn arrives — people who feel the slight edge in the October breeze and begin to dread the long, dark nights of winter — a sovereign remedy is at hand.
The Friends of the Emporia Public Library began its fall book sale today, and the open spaces of the first floor of the library are filled with thousands of doses of medicine for whatever ails the melancholy spirit or the dulled imagination.
The profits from the sale go to library projects.
Books are more than words on paper. They can entertain, educate or provoke — sometimes, they can do all three at once. A good book can transport a reader instantly from a gray, rainy fall day to a garden in spring or from a Kansas easy chair to a sailing ship dipping through a tropic sea.
Ninety years ago, Christopher Morley’s character Roger Mifflin celebrated the power of books in the novel “Parnassus on Wheels”:
“Lord!” he said, “when you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night — there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.”
The arrival of radio, television, computers and the Internet have not changed that a bit. The written word is still a wonderful way to inspire and to teach.
The Friends of the Library has thousands of books — novels, histories, references, biographies, textbooks, how-to books — for sale this week. Cheap.
Among those books are fortifying tonics for the anemic soul, limbering balms for the arthritic imagination and strengthening potions for the under-exercised mind.
Every one of those useful remedies is available without a prescription.
Go to the book sale — it’s good for what ails you.