Library legacy

Somewhere across the world a man called Pastor Girma has my dad’s Bible.

After Dad died, I was happy to find a home for at least some of his books. So when the church announced a need for Bibles in Africa, I packed up his richly bound chain reference edition and sent it off.

Executing an estate demands a lot of decisions: what to give away, sell, or – gulp – dump. For our family, many treasures were obvious, like the 1756 edition of Samuel Johnson’s first dictionary, which a local university took gladly. We kept a lot of the Mennonitica, like the original editions of P.M. Friesen’s Mennonite Brethren history.

We’d pause in our triage to wonder: Why had this volume survived previous prunings? Had some of the books we were lobbing so casually into the discard box been markers on his intellectual or spiritual pilgrimage?

I imagined my heirs going through my library, flinging out mementoes I had lovingly kept through many moves.

Will they check for inscriptions, as in John Diefenbaker’s three-volume autobiography? Some signatures took effort to get, but today anyone can stand in line for a signed Margaret Atwood or David Bergen.

A few original editions may survive, like Rudy Wiebe’s landmark first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many, and his second, First and Vital Candle, one of my favourites but seemingly no one else’s (not even his).

Pruning my stacks

They are sure to thin out Ethics in Business and Labor by J. Daniel Hess (1977), the first book ever to cite an article of mine.

Doomed, too, is Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, which I’ve kept as a nod to the seismic impact it had on my generation back in 1970. An evangelical bestseller, it popularized the dispensational theology that for a time captivated many Christians, including Mennonite Brethren.

Today, of course, we have the astoundingly successful Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. Decades ago, Jerry was my boss at a Christian magazine in the U.S. He was the best copy editor I’ve ever had, and a fine human being too. I don’t fully share his take on the End Times, but he remains a dear friend.

Which reminds me of Hilary, third in Jerry’s early series of Christian-woman-thriller novels, the Margo Mysteries. I keep this one around because it’s the first (well, only) book ever dedicated to me. My family will never know this when they prune my stacks, but there it is in small print: “To Wally Kroeker.”

Then there’s Beyond the Rat Race by Art Gish, a leader in the Christian community movement of the early 1970s, which thrust me into the spiritual contradictions of consumerism. My wife Millie and I visited his Kentucky commune and were drawn by their life together, but decided it was not for us. Still, the book occupies a fond spot on shelf and memory – until my executors dispatch it.

They won’t blink to dump The Charismatic Movement, an early Eerdmans analysis of this outgrowth of Pentecostalism. Its most unusual feature is a 45 rpm recording in the inside back cover of someone speaking in tongues. Likely few of my heirs will recognize the technology (“Hey, look at this big floppy disk with the huge hole in the middle”), much less be able to access a turntable with a big enough spindle to play it.

With luck they’ll at least pause at The Young Evangelicals, my favourite book of 1974. I’d want them to know how Richard Quebedeaux helped me sort out the various strands of evangelicalism at a pivotal time in the movement’s self-understanding. I found it reassuring that I didn’t have to groan at being known as an evangelical every time a co-religionist did something goofy. This movement had different strands, and mine was what the author called New Evangelical. Understanding how I differed from Separatist Fundamentalism, Open Fundamentalism, and Establishment Evangelicalism made it possible for me to define myself loosely as an evangelical, which I still do today.

An elder statesman

Only Baby Boomers remember the name Danny Orlis, the earnest protagonist of a long-running Christian radio and book serial. I’d never been a Danny Orlis fan as a child (my series of choice was the Sugar Creek Gang, of which I still have an impressive collection), but I had the great fortune to encounter author Bernie Palmer when I was a reporter for the Regina Leader-Post in the late 1960s. When I discovered that the Nebraskan spent summers in northern Saskatchewan writing his popular radio-serials-cum-novels, I decided to check it out.

Palmer and his wife Marj, whose plywood cottage was situated on Dore Lake, 75 miles beyond the end of paved highway in a remote part of Saskatchewan, welcomed Millie and me graciously. I learned a lot from this elder statesman, not only about the disciplines of writing but also how to fillet and smoke northern pike. By the time we left, I had a story for my newspaper and a treasured new friend.

Our paths crossed periodically in the years ahead, and Palmer never failed to inspire and encourage. Some of his books remain on my shelf – The Wind Blows Wild, Angry Water, and My Son, My Son (was it coincidence that two minor characters were named Wally and Millie?). They summon memories every time I glance upon them, but my heirs will pitch them, sure enough.

Palmer gave me an early autographed copy of Ken Taylor’s Living Letters, which grew into The Living Bible. While director of Moody Press, Taylor began paraphrasing Paul’s epistles on the commuter train he rode daily into downtown Chicago. His own employer was lukewarm about the project, so Taylor printed 5,000 copies on his own dime and flogged them out of his garage. Billy Graham got hold of it, used it as a promotion, and TLB became the bestselling book in the U.S. for three years, selling more than 40 million copies. I would later ride that same train when I worked in Chicago but I never passed the time nearly as productively.

Then there are those slim volumes that launched Kindred Press back in 1980 when it was the new trade name of the Mennonite Brethren Publishing House in Hillsboro, Kansas. Our first book was The Ties that Bind, a collection of sermons by longtime pastor Marvin Hein. Next was As Angels of Light by Don Ratzlaff, the true story of a young girl caught up in a cult; it was the closest thing we ever had to a bestseller. We published five titles before sharing the trade name with Mennonite Brethren in Canada, where it grew into today’s Kindred Productions.

Many of my books, so mindfully selected, read, underlined, pondered, and quoted, won’t survive a final thinning. But no matter. Whether out of print or out of fashion, they’ve served their purpose. How much life, after all, should a book have?

“When an old man dies,” says an African proverb, “a library burns.” My library probably won’t burn, but it will make a nice stack on the loading dock of the local thrift shop.

Wally Kroeker is editor of Mennonite Economic Development Associates’ magazine Marketplace and a member of River East MB Church, Winnipeg.