Jack’s Library

by Margaret Bresnahan, October, 2022

I met Jack’s library when I first met Jack, moments inside the doorway of the Hoeschlers’ Edgcumbe Road home. My memory is patchy, but I remember he and Linda in warm, enthusiastic smiles greeting us at the front door and perhaps a brief tour of the house before Jack gave us a tour of the garden, starting at the headwaters and taking the platform walkway around the house into what has always felt like a Japanese painting, or a scroll rolling out as the garden’s story unfolds.

But it was in those first minutes at the threshold, talking about the addition they’d made to their Ralph Rapson home and the beautiful transformation of the garage into a library, that Jack brought us into the library. Jack was glowing, and the library was beautiful. Warm maple, a full view of the garden, and a ladder. Artwork even as the furnishings. It was clear that this space came from his heart. With a huge smile, as we were walking out of the room together, Jack said something to the effect of, “When I die, they’re going to carry me out of here.” I felt a mix of admiration and understanding, something to the effect of, “I hope we become friends.”

Most of my time in the library was in great conversation or viewing the garden. I never asked Jack for a tour of his books, but I was always impressed by the wall of them, and once while looking after their cat Cinder, feeling strangely alone in the house without Jack and Linda, I reverently walked up to the bookshelves and moved along until a book on glaciers caught my eye. I read about glaciers all weekend. Sometimes the book felt narrated in Jack’s voice, so vivid his expanse of knowledge and his curiosity.  

The Friday morning before Jack’s service, I arrived at the Hoeschlers’ to work on the project that Linda had assigned me: to get the books that Jack had moved around the house back onto the library shelves. It was the greatest gift I could have asked for.

As people read, books migrate into the places where they’re most conveniently at hand. And as people acquire more books, there’s a need to make room for them amongst the books where they make the most sense to the library’s person. For one person, this might mean that a new book on moss goes amongst Minnesota ecology—if written by a Minnesotan or if it’s used as a reference for Minnesota mosses. A Baroque book might to one person make sense in a “17th Century Europe” section, but to another it belongs in “Architecture General,” as the primary interest in the book is the ornate door handles and architectural furnishings.

A personal library can be a window into a person. Sometimes you can see the weight of their history, where they find comfort and excitement, or where they found deep valleys of interest or broad stretches of open fascination.

The weekend working on Jack’s library was a gift because it felt like all 6’ 2 1/2’’ of him was in the room with me. Getting a sense of what books were on each shelf and—in my rudimentary understanding—how the shelves were arranged was an exercise in seeing the books through his mind. And in each book I could see and hear his curiosity, his insatiable interest and caring about the world—from its large-scale evolution to the person sitting across from him.

Because I am an archivist, and because I have great respect for the conservator’s ethic of “leave a trace” when restoring masterworks, what follows is a brief recounting of the process of reshelving Jack’s library. The point is, this might get a bit into the weeds, and if you are reaching for your gardening machete feel free to skip to the last two paragraphs.

*

I started by bringing all of the books from around the house into the library and arranging them in groups on the library floor. Linda had identified which bookshelves elsewhere in the house held Jack’s books, roughly 100 books total. It was the smaller bite to take, so I started by grouping those books into like-topics. What’s there started to show a pattern—books on religion, Minnesota geography, Minnesota artists, Saint Paul architecture, Minnesota History, WWI, WWII, and so on. It gave me a sense of what kind of specificity of topic I might find on the main library shelves.

The next step was to understand how the main library shelves were organized, so that one could make an educated guess as to where Jack might have placed each book that had been elsewhere in the house. By luck or logic I started in the top left corner and, after a few hours of looking with specificity (a shelf on ancient Egypt, a shelf on Rome, a shelf on the Renaissance) a larger pattern began to emerge. Moving from the first column of books (top to bottom) into the second (top to bottom) and third columns, we were moving chronologically through the evolution of Western civilization.

Eight columns of shelves, progressing towards Jack’s desk in the corner. The first shelf was a group of books I roughly labeled as “Philosophy of History,” and each shelf moved through time and place from there. In column two, after the Enlightenment and England, began sections on the United States, starting with a big-picture overview and moving into the Eastern U.S., colonization, the Civil War, the Frontier, and development by region. Ireland and Scotland were on an upper shelf, which Linda told me could be a reference to a branch of Jack’s family who had emigrated to the U.S. Then Minnesota history merged into architecture and artists of Minnesota; architecture general; geology, geography, and ecology (of a wide range of places); the geography and geology of the Great Lakes Region (with focuses on Wisconsin and Minnesota); and books geared toward children. The closing sidewall of two columns had shelves on Minnesota business history, Economics, Law, and Religion. That sidewall, which is stage left of Jack’s desk, also had three shelves particularly poignant: two shelves that seemed to be current or recent reading/weeding on an assortment of topics, and one shelf, in easy reach from the desk, with daily reference books (e.g. a dictionary) and a selection of books that I might describe as touchstones—writers or writing that, at this point in time, one wants close at hand.

Fascinating were the books woven throughout the topics, showing how Jack connected three or four subjects to create a whole understanding. Incredible to know that Jack had read all of these, and how that knowledge was synthesized for him and fed a curiosity to keep learning.

Each book on the floor found a home on a shelf, using the logic of fitting like-topic to like-topic and, on the shelf itself, looking at each book to find the incoming book’s place in the narrative. I have a record of which shelves books were added to, which were left untouched, and which experienced the rare case of being moved to create space for the books being added. An example of the latter: creating a shelf for the WWII books that had been elsewhere in the house required a slight relocation of the books on WWI (to keep the chronology pattern), which resulted in WWI utilizing the shelf that held books on Cuba and the Cuba books moving to a rather open shelf earlier in the sequence. A few other changes were made before I arrived, creating an altar space for Jack’s urn. And Linda asked that some duplicates be removed and that the oversized art books be moved to her office, as they had been in Jack’s library more for storage convenience.

I’d made shorthand labels for each section of books, so that I could identify their topics at a glance while working on the project. That weekend, as family arrived home and friends came to visit Linda, we saw how the labels were a way for people to appreciate and access the library, an introduction and a “welcome, come forward, look closer.” Linda requested that the labels be kept on the shelves, and the following month we replaced them with printed labels, a blend between my shorthand and hers.

*

The afternoon after Jack’s funeral service, I was in the garden at Hoeschlers’ and overheard William—Jack and Linda’s grandson—asking someone about the labels on the bookshelves of Jack’s library, sharing his fear that the books were being given away. Our paths were just crossing and I stopped us both; I told William, his fear igniting mine, that they weren’t being given away, that the labels were from a project I’d been working on to reshelve some of his grandfather’s books, and that if he’d like I could show him everything I’d done. William gave me a wonderful smile and said okay.

In the library it was quiet. No one else was around. William and I walked up to the shelves and I told him my assignment, how I went about it, and then I started to give him an overview of Jack’s organizational structure as I understood it. We were in the middle of the U.S. and the start of Minnesota architecture when his older brother Jack came in, smiling and wondering. As William went on through the shelves, I gave Jack the project brief and method and the broad strokes of the topics I’d identified. He walked up to the shelves to take a closer look. I said, “let me know if you have any questions” and backed out of the library, leaving William and Jack alone together, looking at their grandfather’s books.