In a column a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my recent road trip to Jackson, Mississippi, where I visited the home of the late novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty, which is now open as a museum. There are books everywhere in Welty’s house, a testament to her passion for reading.
Jackson offers visitors another monument to Welty’s reading life at Banner Hall, a shopping venue that includes a huge sign bearing Welty’s love letter to the written word. It’s a quote from “One Writer’s Beginnings,” the Welty memoir in which she celebrates reading as a feast for the senses.
Here’s what Welty said about her passion for books: “I cannot remember a time when I was not I love with them — with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.”…