"And Please, Stay as Long as You Like"
Late-Night Bookstores and Spiritual Reading
In browsing through Microsynaxis over the past few years, I have noticed a recurring emphasis on reading as a spiritual discipline. Consider, example, the following essays: "Why Christians Must be Readers," "The Return of the Eighth Day Books Catalog," "Tolkien's Epic Genius: The Ring, Force, and Redemption," and "1,000 Books to Read Before You Die."
So I thought I would share the twenty-seven most influential books I have bought from Eighth Day Books during my nineteen years as an English professor at Sterling College.
When I first arrived in Sterling, Kansas (just beneath the center staple of The Rand McNally Atlas) I was dismayed to discover that the nearest Barnes & Noble was more than an hour away in Wichita. But I soon discovered something far superior: Warren Farha's Eighth Day Books. It became my post-PhD haven. And Warren, without knowing it, had become my Kansas professor of books. Nearly all the most important books I have discovered and read during the past nineteen years came from his store, and many were books toward which he personally guided me (marked in red in the photo above).
When I told Warren the story of my father, a Pentecostal preacher, baptizing hippies in the Indian Ocean at the southern tip of Africa in the early 1970s, he smiled and told me about his own early experiences in the Jesus Movement and his lasting affection for Pentecostals. Although he was deeply rooted in Orthodox theology, his love for, and knowledge of, other Christian traditions always amazed me.
Eighth Day became epicenter of my postdoctoral reading. That education began with the four foundational books pictured in the bottom row: Pope John Paul II's Man and Woman He Created Them; The Old English Psalms, which inspired my continuing project of rewriting the Psalter in Old English-style language; Charles Williams's Outlines of Romantic Theology, his posthumously published theology of romantic love, praised by C.S. Lewis but never granted the theological attention it deserved; and G.K. Chesterton's Autiobiography, a book he seems to have written under duress, and the last and perhaps funniest book he ever wrote.
The second row contains the Orthodox writers who have most influenced me, three of whom Warren introduced to me. And the third and fourth rows contain books on the Inklings that have guided my understanding of Tolkien, Lewis, Williams, and Chesterton.
But to understand what kind of man Warren was, however, I must tell one final story. It was ten o'clock at night. Warren had begun turning off the lights. I was lying on the carpet in the poetry section, surrounded by Dante, C.S. Lewis, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, oblivious to the darkness slowly advancing around me. Then I heard Warren cough, very politely, just above me.
"Sorry to disturb you, Mark," he said. "I have to lock up, but..."
"No, not at all. I'll be on my way," I attempted to say. But Warren interrupted me.
"Would you mind leaving through the back door when you go? Just click the latch behind you. And please, stay as long as you like. Just switch off the lights before you leave."
I will never forget this act of outrageous hospitality and trust, leaving me, a bookaholic, alone inside a three-story bookstore while the traffic hummed outside.
It was heaven. Or as close as one can get here in Wichita.
MARK C. WATNEY is professor emeritus at Sterling College, assisting in its newly established C. S. Lewis Center. He has given papers at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies and Dordt College, and he is the recipient of the 2017 Jacques Maritain Award for Non-Fiction.
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