Katie’s Bio:

Katie Noah Gibson is a lover of books, travel, knitting, mellow music, dark chocolate and colorful scarves. She grew up on the plains of West Texas, where she still lives with her husband, Jeremiah, whom she married last June. Katie holds two degrees in English, has been writing since she could hold a pen, and plans every day how to get back to Oxford, England, where she spent a year earning her master's degree. Her writing has been published in Radiant magazine’s print and online editions, as well as the online editions of Everyday Woman and Relevant magazines. Visit her blog at http://katieleigh.wordpress.com.

Book By Its Cover

By Katie Noah Gibson

 

The books on her mantel were arranged by color.

She was not an artist, but it pleased her to have the books up there, a gentle rainbow of spines of different thicknesses, textures ranging from white-webbed paperback fiction to smooth, pristine dust jackets of books bought for reference or charm and read only once.

It often amazed her how many colors books came in, and how frequently (though not always), the color and weight of the book suited the subject matter inside.

There was Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, the cover a deep rich shade of purple, heavy but not ponderous, like the rich, dark, layered story inside. There was a slim book of Shakespeare’s Wit and Wisdom, a line drawing of the author on the cover, the dust jacket frayed from years of wear.

She liked to run her eyes over the line of books, beginning at pale yellow and golden, like a sunrise, then deepening to scarlet, green, blue, purple, black. Lightness and darkness, wit and humor and sad poignant stories, all up there for everyone to see.

These were other people’s secrets. She hid hers deeper.

Other books in her house were arranged by genre—dog-eared writing books stacked judiciously together, fiction regimented by author’s last name, no matter if the subject matters clashed and fussed. But the books on the mantel were special. She had chosen each one of them by hand.

It hadn’t been her idea to put them there. She was sometimes slightly embarrassed by how many books she had, even though she was proud of her library and often bought books before new clothes. He had suggested it when she was despairing over where to put them all, and the mantel had become like a banner for her, a symbol of what she loved best, what everyone saw first when they came into her house.

The books had come from different places: some given to her as gifts, one yellow-covered novel still in its library binding, handwritten signatures in a few of them, from towns she had visited or lived in. When she looked at them she heard the creak of the steep stairway at Blackwells, felt the uneven varnished oak boards of the third floor where they kept the used books. She also saw the dusty back room at the Oxfam shop where she had worked, sorting used books into stacks by price and writing the week number in pencil on the flyleaf page.

Some were stamped with her very own name stamp, the one her sister had given her two Christmases ago. Others had her name written in them, at age fourteen, seventeen, twenty, twenty-five.

She never bought books specifically for the mantel, but sometimes new acquisitions found their way up there. A slim, turquoise book of essays on writing; a memoir about piano shops in Paris; a blue hardbound copy of Pride and Prejudice, bought for a pound at the bookstall outside St. Giles. Not all the books spoke of Oxford, though many of them, she admitted, did.

Though he often stood in front of the fireplace, to warm his hands or gaze at the spines, he never disturbed her system. He had, in fact, studied it so long and so well that she didn’t find the book for two weeks.

One day, as she reached between a green novel and a blue travelogue, her hand felt something unfamiliar. She pulled out a tiny book of love poems, bound in old blue-green leather with gold-foil stamped hearts on the spine.

She turned to the first page and a scrap of paper fell out.

Will you marry me? it said.

She wrote Yes on the back with her favorite pen, and placed the book carefully back between I Capture the Castle and Without Reservations.

From the kitchen that evening she watched as he, thinking himself unobserved, removed the book and turned over the scrap of paper.

Only after he read her answer did she emerge, and, putting her arms around him, whisper her “yes” again in his ear.

***