(commercialappeal.com) LOS ANGELES — Working entirely on her own, spending her librarian’s salary and later her Social Security checks, Mayme Clayton amassed one of the finest collections of African-American history in the world — and stored it in her garage.
“I got to warn you, it’s scary in here.” This is Mayme’s son, Avery Clayton, talking. He’s jiggling his keys and opening the door. He reaches, finds the light switch, clicks. Inside? It is amazing.
“Originally,” Avery apologizes, “there were tables and chairs, like a library, and you could sit down. But as you can see –.”
The roof sags, it may leak. There are books, floor to ceiling on shelves, but the passages between the stacks are blocked, with storage cabinets and film cases and cardboard boxes overflowing with photographs, journals, cartoons, correspondence, playbills, magazines, all dusted with a soft fungal dander. Mold.
The old garage appears held together by its peeling paint, out in an overgrown garden, behind a bungalow in a modest neighborhood. For a moment, before the eye begins to settle on the antique book spines in the gloomy light, the garage looks like a hoarder’s hiding place, ready for a bulldozer and a trip to the city dump.
“She was a hoarder, she was,” Avery says. “But she was a hoarder with a vision.” (more…)
Give me a room full of old books, magazines and other artifacts and I am just in my own world. I remember many moons ago going to my great-grandparents house (they had both passed by this time) and seeing their pot-bellied stove with utensils still in tact. I also remember seeing a small stack of old books and other items. As my mom was going through the stack of books, we came across one of my great-grandmother’s old school books. Dusty? Yes. Smelled moldy? Priceless to our family? Definitely yes! This is why I love taking pictures and video of my family (note to self: Try to include yourself in the pictures that you take. This is a bad habit of mine).
Sphere: Related Content
