Library gems.

I enjoy bookstores, but there's something extra special about walking through the stacks of an old library.

In a bookstore all the books have bright, shining covers all trying to attract your attention and wanting to be taken home. In a library, the books are generally those that have found an audience and manage to get taken off those cramped-together shelves. They don't need to prove themselves or attract a reader with bright, flashy covers. Often the books are jacket-less and rather drab looking. I love looking through these books for gems that might be new to me.

Yesterday I found such a book. New? Not even close. The physical book itself is 98 years old (judging by the publication date and copyright). It's a book of plays by a Norwegian playwright I'd never heard of (shame on me): Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

I'm only half way through the first play ("Love and Geography") in this book ("Plays by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson - Second Series"), and I'm absolutely loving it. Like his contemporary, Ibsen, Bjornson writes of social realism. Unlike much of Ibsen, this play is very approachable and often quite funny:

Some poet who was married said once that he carried his home on his back like a snail. And the fool meant it as a praise of marriage! -- When I meet one of my colleagues on the street -- on of the married ones, I mean -- I
always raise my hat twice: once, openly and respectfully, for the man himself;
and once, secretly and in pity, for his hump!

And, in a domestic squabble, a woman says: "May the Lord protect and preserve everybody from getting married to any one who writes books."

Of course I'm getting a good chuckle out of all this and I'm thinking to myself that this work needs to be staged. Almost certainly Bjornson's work would be remounted regularly but for the fact that he is so over-shadowed by Ibsen that people forget that there were other writers working at the same time.

Doing a real quick "Ask" search for Bjornson, I see that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1903 and authored many books as well as plays (I'm looking forward to reading Sigurd the Bastard). He was very politically active and was the director of two different theatres in Norway and editor of the Norsk Folkeblad.

But what amazes me is how this play, written 100+ years ago, could easily be played as a contemporary piece; in fact, seems more modern now than it probably would have back in the late 1800's. And it is this ability to capture the heart of people, rather than a period, that makes me want to read more.

And it is this discovery of a hundred year old gem, that will keep my browsing the stacks of drab spines in libraries for as long as I can.