Ex Libris: Ray Bradbury

Bradbury also wrote about books and writers. No—he did more than merely write about them, he celebrated them; he shouted their names from the rooftops. He’d fallen in love with a platoon of writers and wanted us to do the same.
Neva later introduced him to Frank Baum’s “Oz” series. Filled with fantastical events and dreams, these books, along with others owned by Neva like “Alice in Wonderland,” had a lifelong impact on this master of fantasy. Neva, he later wrote, had sparked what he called his “Journey to Far Metaphor.”
Libraries pop up throughout his work. In his novel “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” for instance, Charles Halloway, a pivotal character in the story, works as a janitor in the local library. In Bradbury’s short story “Exchange,” a young man in uniform revisits the library of his adolescence looking for “old pals.” Soon recognizing the man as the boy she had once known, the librarian goes to the stacks and brings out some ink-and-paper friends: “Tarzan of the Apes,” “John Carter, Warlord of Mars,” “Ivanhoe,” “Robin Hood,” and others.
The result of this grand word-romp, “Fahrenheit 451,” tells the story of futuristic fireman Guy Montag, whose job is not to put out fires but to burn books. While rightly considered a dystopian classic—it remains standard reading in many schools today—”Fahrenheit 451” is also a song, a profound hymn to the power and beauty of books.
Those ghosts can speak to all of us, Bradbury would doubtless agree, if only we open and read their books.