I just love the smell of a book store. It’s something about newness, I think. I love to open up a book and feel the crisp pages as I turn them, and the binding as it softens up. But to lovers of books like myself, I think it’s more than that. It’s the smell of new worlds to be explored, exotic places to travel, new people to meet, new places of escape. I have always liked being surrounded by books and have real trouble getting rid of any. They are old friends. Even if I don’t read them much anymore, I just like knowing they are around. I remember when we were newly married and moved into my husband’s townhome, I pointed to the boxes of books I owned and told him I needed bookshelves. He got me a bookshelf...as in ONE bookshelf. “You don’t know me at all!” I cried, as he looked at me in disbelief. He would find out...many bookshelves later. He has been very patient about this.

Some of the books I own are new, and I can’t wait to dig into them. Another group I’ve owned for years but have yet to read (I have too many books in this group, unfortunately). Some of them are old, like my beat-up copy of Macbeth that has my maiden name on it and has my old annotations, written in bubbly, early-twenties handwriting that I barely recognize as mine anymore. The binding completely fell apart the other day when I was reading to the class, and my students had to wait patiently as I carefully taped the errant page back in. I treasure all of them.

My love affair with books led me to one of my current roles at this school, which is to order and distribute all the books we read here to our K-12 students. This way I can still be surrounded by books, but not ones I have to find room for in my own home. But I can pick them up and smell them whenever I want! What could be a better job for me? My last estimate is that we distribute around 8,000 books to our students during the month of August. It’s overwhelming, even for a book-lover like me. For a couple of months in the summer I feel like I’m drowning in books. They are coming in left and right, Amazon drivers are calling me about where to deliver more, people come to me out of nowhere with extras they have found in classrooms that students have left behind. I feel like I have them coming out of my pores. Even I have my limit! But at some point in the summer, they are all stacked up and ready to distribute, and absolutely everyone who walks through the door has the same reaction:

“Wow.”

In that moment, I think people realize what a feat this school has managed in what our head of school has often referred to as a “post-literate society.” We still love books here.

Many parents, rightly concerned with practical issues like limited storage space, ask if they can decline taking a new book if they have multiple copies of it at home. We ask them to take them home anyway, for this main reason: we have a dream that each of your children will create a personal library. That library will contain books that are annotated with their own markings. Some of them they’ll keep because each time they see the title, they’ll be reminded of a teacher, a discussion, a thought, or a story, from their past that opened up a new world for them. Others they will keep because they were difficult, but they fought through the content and survived (here’s looking at you, Calculus book!). We want our children to read because we want good books to help form them as people, and having these books around is a visual and tangible reminder of this process. The books we surround ourselves with are a reflection of who we are, ultimately. I hope your children all have some bookshelves at home where they keep their books. I’m not suggesting everyone keep all books forever. I have let some go over the years that I know I’ll never read again. Gradually I’ve curated my collection and surrounded myself with the ones I feel are most reflective of who I am and how I have become that way. That is a lifelong process.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that some of our students don’t love reading. Maybe reading is hard for them, or maybe they’re burned out by it, or maybe they’ve never read the thing that has really captured their imagination. A school like ours has the difficult task of trying to figure out which books to present to students, and how many, and at what grade level. We may not always get those things right, but we think through it carefully.

But at the end of their time at Saint Constantine, it is my sincere hope that every single student who has been through our program will always walk into a bookstore and be overwhelmed by the smell of new books.