Reading in the Evening

From the time I was a little girl, going to Mr. Murphy's used book store in North Reading Massachusetts with my Grandmother, I have loved old books. Mr. Murphy was a man that marched to his own drum beat. His book store filled with old books. The musty smell of the books combined with a couple of old fat cats made for the atmosphere straight out of some old novel. The man knew every book he had in his store, how I will never know. He didn't have any sort of filing system and the books if in any order, the order was understood by him alone. I am not even sure if he had a cash register. I think he had a simple drawer with dividers for the money.
He liked me, and wanted to cultivate in me a love of books. I would find a story book and ask how much it was, his answer was always about the same. 5 cents. One time I went in there with my family and on the shelf was every book Louisa M Alcott had written, in matched 1st editions. I longingly looked at those. I loved her books and had many times visited the Alcott house in Concord. I asked how much, too young to understand what a collection like that was worth. He looked at me and said, "if you can get $2 together, they are all yours" I came home with a box full of L.M Alcott first editions. Some I had never heard of.
As I grew, so did my love of books. Soon I was asking him if he had any Thoreau's or Nathaniel Hawthorns. I read Edward Roe Snows books of ship wrecks and old and dusty copies of many relatively unknown authors.
One thing Mr. Murphy always wanted to show me was the old Bibles he would get in the store. Family Bibles included boxes of books from estate sales. He would show me the family history carefully written in the middle section of these old Bibles and we would talk about how sad that this information was so carelessly discarded.
I would buy those old Bibles from him, always at a good price, the biggest ones being 25 cents.
I had a good size collection after a few years and soon everyone knew about me collecting old Bibles and people would GIVE me their old family Bibles. I would and still do, sit turning the pages, wondering and imagining about the people that turned the pages of these Bibles through time.
The little one on top is from the late 1700's and the bigger family Bible is from a family in Keene NH, the date 1802. The Bible survived two major fires where everything else in the house was lost. I call it my miracle Bible. I still love old books and am always on the look out for an old family Bible. Some things never change.