Our book today is a courtly thing from 1945: William Dana Orcutt’s memoir From My Library Walls. The book is subtitled “A Kaleidoscope of Memories,” which might make it sound deadly dull and ponderous, but this particular author couldn’t write a ponderous book to say his life. He delighted readers with a dozen or so novels and half a dozen completely charming works of non-fiction, most of them, like this one, centered around authors, books, and book-making (two favorites I once owned and appear to own no longer are The Kingdom of Books and The Magic of the Book).

The book-making he learned as an apprentice to the great and gentle John Wilson of the old University Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts – an enviable position he held as a young man in his early 20s and vigorously dreamed of leaving for the beckoning fame and fortune of being a writer. As he recounts in warmly-remembered detail in these pages, the art of book-printing had sunk to an all-time low around the turn of the 20^th century – the idea of making the physical presentation of a book into a work of art seemed a remote and foreign thing to him, which is deliciously ironic, considering how many gorgeous editions he’d go on to make when he ran the University Press and the Plimpton Press.

In From My Library Walls he recalls the somewhat unlikely catalyst of his change of heart: Mary Baker Eddy, who finished up an editorial meeting with him one day, fixed him with her unblinking gaze, and told him he should stay with the Press. When he protested that he dreamed of making beautiful things, she replied, “If one has beauty in himself, he can put beauty into anything.” And it stuck with him.

That Mary Baker Eddy story is one of dozens in these pages. “From My Library Walls” refers not to books taken down from shelves but to framed portraits that look down from walls, pictures like that of Mrs. Eddy, reminding him of all the great and famous people he’s met in his long life in the literary world. He recalls talking with J. M. Barrie at London’s Garrick Club and telling him a story about how the stage-play of Peter Pan was playing in the boondocks of the New World:

I told Barrie of a criticism of the play that had gone the rounds in America. “Peter Pan,” was on the road, playing a one night stand in some provincial Western town. The dramatic critic of the town’s single paper indignantly demanded: “When will our public refuse to accept plays whose producers seek to economize on road productions? In ‘Peter Pan,’ last night, the fairy was played by a dot of light. Undoubtedly in the metropolitan performances the fairy was dressed in full tights.”

Barrie smiled, but his mind was on the play rather than my story. “It is my dream child,” he said slowly. “It was at that very table,” he continued, pointing across the room, “that Peter Pan’s future was established.”

He remembers the long correspondence he carried on with Thomas Hardy, and the time Rudyard Kipling marked up a proof at this desk at the University Press. In a piece daringly titled “The Redundancy of Henry James,” he reflects on his initial growing dissatisfaction with the Master’s work:

I have read everything Henry James ever wrote, but I must admit that this has been due to my zeal as a student rather than because I enjoyed the reading. At one time I came to the conclusion that Henry James was having a beautiful adventure with himself at the expense of his readers. At this point I decided to remove myself from the guinea-pig class, and let his next book go by without reading it.

(But then of course he meets James, which promptly changes his disposition)

And predictably for somebody so intimately connected with the book-chat world, Orcutt is sensitive throughout his book to the mysterious ways of literary taste-making. He’s a gently wry narrator of literary foibles, and some of his digressions on the how and why of the book-recommendation business still resonate today, when that business has achieved a sheer sprawl he couldn’t possibly have imagined:

How do we know what to read? Not from subscribing to a book club, which does our literary thinking for us, and tells us what books to let them supply Not by selecting a book because it is a best-seller. Not by straining to get a copy of a book that is banned. Our literary appetite should be balanced, and, unless we ourselves are competent to select a satisfying literary menu, the selection of the “committees” of the various book clubs can hardly be expected to rescue us from our incompetence. The old bromide, “How can I know whether or not I like a book until I read a criticism?” is no more absurd than the more recent reply of the debutante: “How can I tell what I think until I hear what I say?”

From My Library Walls is every bit as lively and friendly as it was the first time I read it, many, many years ago. I was thrilled to find a copy at my beloved Brattle Bookshop, even though the dust jacket of the thing was practically disintegrating before my eyes. A little tender care should fix that, and then the book will be on my library walls, ready for periodic revisiting.