Author Jason Reynolds: ‘Books are my craft and my tools’

Jason Reynolds, best-selling young-adult author

As soon as you walk in the door, there is a shelf with at least 12 art books: Egon Schiele, Mark Rothko, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Paul Klee. Above that are my most prized books. I have a first-edition signed Toni Morrison Beloved. I have Langston Hughes’ Montage of a Dream Deferred. I have Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, first-edition James Baldwins, first-edition Richard Wrights, old black folk-tale books from Julius Lester, Countee Cullen, all kinds of very rare books.
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Last summer, I started a little mobile library called the Remarkable Bookcycle. For 35 years, there was a bright pink bookstore in my town called Remarkable Book Shop. We had this cargo tricycle just sitting in our garage. I paid a high school student to turn it into a mobile free library. We cycle it around the beach in summer. I lurk around the bookcycle; I love to watch what happens. What’s extraordinary is that everyone gathers around the bookcycle and has conversations. I’m now able to get rid of books much more easily knowing they’re going to a good home.
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My book collection is little bit messy. I have books in the bathroom, books in the TV room. My wife and I both have books in the bedroom, on both sides of the bed. Books in the main library, books in the dining room. And in the kitchen, we have whatever we are working with at that moment. Right now, it’s a book from a chef in Spain, from the 1890s. I have a lot of books everywhere.

It gives you a feeling of protection. I like the smell of old books – especially old books that have a dried flower, a piece of paper, a note on the edge. It’s fascinating. For a guy like me who left his country young, it’s almost like my cape. I’m more powerful with them around.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/marie-kondo-bibliophiles-books-decluttering-tidying-a8864926.html