Chapter iii · The Why Library

The books a person carries.

Most people, asked which books they remember from childhood, name two or three. The list is short, specific, and not always the one the adult would have predicted.

The self-memory system, and where a book gets filed.

A child encounters hundreds of books before the age of ten. Most are forgotten before adolescence. Two or three are carried — across moves, across decades, sometimes across continents — and pulled down again, occasionally, in adulthood, with a particular kind of attention. The dominant theoretical framework for thinking about this is the self-memory system proposed by Martin Conway and Christopher Pleydell-Pearce in Psychological Review in 2000. Autobiographical memory, they argued, is not a passive recording of life events. It is an actively constructed system, organised around the self.

The system is hierarchical. At the top is the self-concept — the broad sense of who one is. Below it are lifetime periods, then general events, then event-specific knowledge: the smell of roast in the oven, the way the dog moved under the table. A book read in childhood enters at the level of event-specific knowledge. Whether it stays there, gets promoted to a general event, or is integrated into the self-concept itself depends on something parents and researchers have spent considerable time trying to predict. The honest answer is: how strongly it touches the self at the time of reading.

What the developmental record shows.

Patricia Bauer, in her summary of decades of work on memory development, describes the slow consolidation of autobiographical memory across childhood. Under three, children show what is sometimes called childhood amnesia: a general inability to retain explicit memories from before the self-concept becomes articulate enough to provide an organising structure. After three, memory becomes increasingly self-organised. By six or seven, a child has a substantial autobiographical archive. By the late teens, the archive is, in important respects, the person. Books read during this consolidation period are not stored separately. They are stored in the same architecture.

This is why people remember childhood books in the same breath as they remember childhood houses. The two are filed together. A book that touched the self at the time of reading is filed alongside the rest of what was filed about the self: the room, the parent reading aloud, the kitchen smell of that period, the dog in the corner. Twenty years later, when the adult reaches for the book, it returns not as a separate object but as part of a constellation. The personalised storybook is one of the few literary forms that can engineer that constellation deliberately — by writing the book around the specific child rather than the average one.

The object as anchor, the text as the memory.

Memory in childhood is partly indexed by physical artefact. Recall is improved when the original object is present at retrieval — the smell of the book, the feel of its corners, the particular way a page has been folded by a small hand twenty years before. A book that falls apart in five years cannot anchor a memory for thirty. A book that is read once and put in a drawer cannot accumulate a constellation. The press makes the books it does — perfect-bound, matte cover — because the object has to outlast the reading by several decades. The decision is craft. It is also memory.

The book stays on the shelf at the parents' house long after the child has left. Twenty years later, the child takes it down again, and the dust is exactly where the child left it.

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Cited.

• Conway, M. A., & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 107(2), 261–288. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.107.2.261
• Bauer, P. J. (2007). Remembering the times of our lives: memory in infancy and beyond. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203936948
• Mar, R. A. (2018). Stories and the promotion of social cognition. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(4), 257–262. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417749654
• Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N. A., & Kirker, W. S. (1977). Self-reference and the encoding of personal information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(9), 677–688. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.35.9.677
• Solomon, A. (2012). Far from the tree: parents, children, and the search for identity. Scribner.

a storybook no one else has ever read.