Joanna Clapps Herman

Unpacking 20 boxes of books, that I had stored for eight years after my husband, Bill, died and I’d had to move, I found my small leather atlas about 6 X 5. It’s the kind of thing I coveted with such lust when I came upon it in a store of maps and globes that on an impulse, I’d bought it knowing it was way too expensive. But in that moment, it seemed as if owning that one small leather-bound atlas would confer upon me a library with good deep reading chairs, a fine immense desk, perfect lamps, an expensive slightly worn rug.

There was also a fireplace and a window that looked out on my garden, rather than the one-bedroom apartment where I actually live in Harlem with my single table that is dining, prep table and desk. I rarely open that atlas, even now, but when I came upon it along with six copies of War and Peace, all my other books, Bill’s dissertation, his marked-up Ulysses, I felt the same thrill of my leather beauty. It’s so compact and it holds the whole world and the many places I’ll never get to see.