These books belonged to my mother’s father. I took what I could from his home/bookstore while cleaning it out somewhere around the turn of the last century. He was wasting away in a nursing home at the time and the following year he died, the property was sold and the house demolished. The title of this work, Day Is Done is a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of my grandfather’s favorite poets. I read the poem at his funeral in late September of 2001. I was living in New York City and drove to Ohio only days after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. These books are about half of the nearly 3,000 books I saved from his house and still have. The books were never very well cared for, not by me or him. He had a fire going most of the time and many of the books were stained and/or reeked of fire smoke. The destruction of his home and property and the books themselves is mirrored by the cultural degradation we see in the many unrecognizeable authors and titles we can read along the spines. Some still familiar and others long forgotten. There’s a biography of Adolph Hitler, titled Der Fuehrer, a name historically and currently synonymous with unspeakable evil. Here, now, over twenty years after his death at age 83—from natural causes—the incinerated body of my grandfather, a veteran of the second world war who crossed the mine and submarine infested waters of the North Atlantic fifty-eight times on a troop transport for the Merchant Marine, is mixed with graphite and resin to illustrate, preserve, and entomb what was left of his vast library that at one time included over 30,000 books while he was alive. There are certain cherished authors among these books I only know because I grew up where and when and how I did. How else would I know W. Somerset Maugham, or the symbol reproduced on all his books, found by his father while traveling through Morocco, a Moorish symbol to bring luck and “ward off the evil eye.” My grandfather’s book shop might be the only reason I know the lyrical and nihilistic poems of Algernon Charles Swinburn, or Sherwood Anderson’s, Winesburg Ohio. It’s certainly the only reason I know Tennyson and his Idylls of the King. His shop was never organized, books were stacked on the floor, leaning over, collapsed, or packed in rows two deep on shelves. There was a dedicated section of poetry which he loved, and a special place for illustrated children books but the rest of the books were as randomly assorted and mixed up as they are here. Books on boxing and Shakespeare fell together amid innumerable absurdly titled books now long out of print and consigned to oblivion. Day Is Done is a portrait of a man, a time and a culture, flickering out like a faulty film reel before completely vanishing. The work is also a tribute to a shared love of books. If we come from somewhere and if we come from someone, which in many ways we do, I owe my love of books to the wonderful and flawed man who was my grandfather. the following is the complete Longfellow poem that I read at his funeral.“The day is done, and the darkness / Falls from the wings of Night, / As a feather is wafted downward / From an eagle in his flight. // I see the lights of the village / Gleam through the rain and the mist, / And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me / That my soul cannot resist: // A feeling of sadness and longing, / That is not akin to pain, / And resembles sorrow only / As the mist resembles the rain. // Come, read to me some poem, / Some simple and heartfelt lay, / That shall soothe this restless feeling, / And banish the thoughts of day. // Not from the grand old masters, / Not from the bards sublime, / Whose distant footsteps echo / Through the corridors of Time. // For, like strains of martial music, / Their mighty thoughts suggest / Life’s endless toil and endeavor; / And to-night I long for rest. // Read from some humbler poet, / Whose songs gushed from his heart, / As showers from the clouds of summer, / Or tears from the eyelids start; // Who, through long days of labor, / And nights devoid of ease, / Still heard in his soul the music / Of wonderful melodies. // Such songs have power to quiet / The restless pulse of care, / And come like the benediction / That follows after prayer. // Then read from the treasured volume / The poem of thy choice, / And lend to the rhyme of the poet / The beauty of thy voice. // And the night shall be filled with music, / And the cares, that infest the day, / Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, / And as silently steal away.