This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 24, 2013 - When she was 9-years-old, Marguerite Garrick reached up into a bookshelf in the living room of her family’s Chicago apartment and pulled out a book.
"People and Places" by Margaret Mead came down, and with it, new worlds and ideas and lives to explore.
More than 50 years later, she hopes the hundreds of books from her mother and father’s library will create that same experience for someone new.
She has donated many to the Greater St. Louis Book Fair, which will benefit education and literacy programs.
Indeed, many treasures will be found among the books spread about over rows of folding tables. But early birds can find a collection of books from the library of Garrick’s parents, Carol and Marlin Perkins. Perkins, a conservationist and director of the St. Louis Zoo from 1962 to 1970, also hosted “Mutual of Omaha’s WIld Kingdom” during that time. Carol Perkins was a noted conservationist, leading expeditions around the world.
In her own home growing up, Garrick says, her father was endlessly curious.
“He was so interested in the natural world and in the people who lived in it.”
That curiosity found a home inside bookshelves around the couple’s home, with many first editions and signed copies of popular works. Volunteers with the book fair were often surprised at the pieces she gave them.
But Garrick’s mother, when she knew she’d meet an author, always brought along four copies of a book to be signed. One for her, and one for each of her children. Now, in her own home, Garrick has her own special library.
In going though her parents’ things, Garrick took the time to reconnect with her father and his passion.
“The whole process of clearing out their home was kind of wonderful,” she says, “and obviously poignant. I loved it. I loved going through these books and seeing notations that he’d made.”
The Perkins’ collection is among the treasures of this year’s sale. Each year, as books come in and, eventually, come out onto the tables in the dim parking garage, special items always appear.
Some years, there are a few great finds. Some years, there are a lot of them.
This year is one of the latter, says Jean Riezman, board president with the Greater St. Louis Book Fair.
“It’s like a treasure hunt every year, because we never know what we’re going to get in,” she says.
Other pieces from the Perkins collection include a volume of “Royal Natural History,” published in 1893 and a signed, first-edition copy of “Toto and I: A Gorilla in the Family,” by A. Maria Hoyt.
The fair also features a collection of religious books from the 1920s, '30s and '40s that belonged to Walter A. Maier, a theologian with “The Lutheran Hour,” radio program. There’s also an Atlas Map of Franklin County from 1878 and a letter from 1645.
The sale features a number of books from the 1700s and 1800s, Riezman says, as well as a great variety of books on subjects from art to history to fitness.
What makes one piece a treasure over another depends on the customer, Riezman says. Everyone is looking for something different.
Proceeds from this year’s sale will not go to the Nursery Foundation of St. Louis, which closed earlier this year. Riezman says the fair is looking for new organizations to work with and may reintroduce a grant program to give out the funds. Regardless, those funds will stay in St. Louis, she says.
In gathering her parents’ books for the sale, Garrick had to look over them three or four times to decide what to keep and what to give. She’s happy that something like the fair exists, and was happy to share them with an organization that was so careful with her family’s treasures.
And this weekend, she hopes the people who find them will help her mother and father’s books have new life, bringing them into new worlds, too.