Diary: Laurie Hertzel, A Reading Life

The basement book room became my sanctuary, one of the few places in the house where it was quiet

Young Laurie in Duluth

We called our father Guv, which was short for “Guv’nor,” a word for English people who were in charge. Or that’s what Guv told me. I accepted this, even though he was not English; he was half Irish and half German, descended from immigrants from County Kerry on one side, and of Germans-­from-Russia on the other. Guv’s father—whom we called by his first name, John—­was the youngest of twelve. Grandfather John was born in Missouri, but some of his older siblings were born in Ukraine, and one died there. His parents spoke only German.

Guv taught English first at the University of Minnesota in Duluth and then, later, at the University of Wisconsin in Superior just over the bridge. He was short and strong, a walker and a tennis player, and he had a brush cut that made him look like the comedian George Gobel.

One winter Guv moved boxes of his books down into the basement. Our dim, damp basement had concrete floors and a huge furnace in the far back corner that scared us with its mammoth size and roaring fire. We liked to terrify ourselves by creeping up to it, opening its small metal door, leaping back at the sight of the flames.

We all feared the basement. You could be in the back, at the far end by the wooden shelves that held packed boxes and Christmas decorations, happily poking around, prying up cardboard flaps, peering inside, looking for treasures, and then some unseen person might turn off the basement light and shut the door at the top of the stairs. The sudden darkness. The clicking latch. Maybe they didn’t know I was down there. Maybe they did, and they wanted to scare me. But oh, how I gathered myself, all my courage, plotted my route, sprinted across the cold floor, dodging whatever spooky clawed hands were reaching for me in the dark, up the stairs, bursting into the kitchen, yelling, “I was down there!” Sometimes, the door to the bright, safe kitchen was locked and then all I could do was make a fist and pound and pound and pound.

But I was also drawn to the basement. It was stuffed with fascinating things: big cardboard barrels that held old net curtains from the house in Louisville and that I could fit inside of (but then had trouble climbing back out of); a rack of drab winter coats that hung musty and lifeless in one corner—­one year I methodically ripped one button off of each one for my button collection; cartons of old clothes and dishes and books and toys, packed so full and left for so long that the damp cardboard sides were beginning to split.

An old metal fireplace surround stood propped against a wall; we used to open the flue, which we thought of as a secret compartment, and hide things inside: jelly beans, troll dolls, notes that disappeared and were never answered. Among the chaos was one area of calm and order: the tiny book room. In the far corner opposite the furnace was a painted white wooden door that opened with a metal farmhouse-­style thumb latch that I was never sure I could master; each time, I worried that I wouldn’t get in or, once in, out. A high window had been cut into one of the interior walls, providing air and a sense of connection with the rest of the house, but it was too high for me to see out of unless I climbed on a chair. This was good: Any ghosts or creatures on the other side went unnoticed.

Guv had installed black metal shelving around three walls of the little room and placed his books on them in alphabetical order. People who used books as decoration in their living space were blue-­collar show-­offs, he said, so he kept his books hidden away upstairs and in the basement, like a true scholar. The basement book room became my sanctuary, one of the few places in the house where it was quiet, where I wasn’t sharing space with two or five or seven other siblings.

To get there meant creeping down the wooden stairs, hanging on to the red-­painted banister, peering into the dark corners to see what was down there, and then sprinting across the floor to the back, pulling open the white door, falling happily inside.

I shut the door, pulled the cotton string to turn on the ceiling light (I had to jump to reach it), and stayed for hours, stayed until I got too cold or had to go to the bathroom, or until my mother called my name, looking for me, no idea where I was, usually no idea where most of us were; there were too many of us and we all had too many secrets. The book room was the best place in the house, even though it was surrounded by cold and dark and scariness. Guv, or someone, had brought down a rough red plaid wool blanket, and I sat on it in summer, wrapped myself in it in winter, chose a book from the shelf, slid down onto the floor, and read for hours.

My usual taste was for fairy tales, the Little House books, and, especially, anything that featured a plucky orphan—­The Boxcar Children, Pippi Longstocking, or Anne of Green Gables. I secretly hoped I was adopted—­it would explain so much! But even I knew my harried parents, once they had six children, would not have gone to the trouble to adopt a seventh.

Recently in Book Post: infrastructure scholar David Alff on the Abundists, Brianna Zimmerman on the lost world of Al Andalus, passages from a new farmer’s almanac on ancient chestnuts, and editor Ann Kjellberg, on glimmerings of a new readership.

But the book room was Guv’s books. Grown-­up books. That hidden collection introduced me to books beyond the scope of the public library’s children’s room. I read them, even when I couldn’t understand them. It was enough, in a way, to mention what I was reading, maybe over the dinner table. Guv was the only one who was interested, and he always listened. I found that I loved short stories—­Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty (“Why I Live at the P.O.” confused me but also made me laugh), William Saroyan’s My Name Is Aram. I read Shakespeare’s comedies out loud, but not his tragedies. And then one afternoon I discovered a small, blue, leather-­bound edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which I read dramatically, out loud, over and over, and then I took it to school and read it out loud to the whole class. I loved the vivid pictures his words painted: the scarlet cloak, the suit of shabby gray, the little patch of blue that prisoners called the sky, and as I stood in front of the class and read (He did not wear his scarlet coat / For blood and wine are red / And blood and wine were on his hands / When they found him with the dead, / The poor dead woman whom he loved, / And murdered in her bed), I noticed the students’ baffled looks. The poem went on and on, page after page, and I sneaked a peek at the teacher as I stumbled, again, over the pronunciation of “hearse,” and when I saw her face I suddenly wished the poem was a whole lot shorter.

Or I paged through the big bound copies of the Great Lakes Sailor, the labor newspaper that Guv had edited for a couple of years after leaving UMD and before he began teaching in Superior. There was his name at the top of the masthead and above articles that I couldn’t understand. I turned the big, fragile pages, searching for his byline, though I could never make it through the boring stories. There were no funnies, no Dear Abby.

Sometimes I locked myself in the bathroom so that I could sit and read in peace, and I wasn’t the only one who thought of that. I sat on the toilet lid and swung my legs and opened the blinds of the small window and peered out at the Grindys’ house next door, and sometimes turned on the faucet and let the water run for a while so that it would sound like I was in there for a legitimate reason. Mostly, though, I just read. It was never very long before someone knocked urgently on the door. “Hurry up!”

“Go downstairs!” I yelled, but nobody ever would; they just continued to knock. “You’re reading!” they yelled back, but I knew how to counter that: “I have a stomachache!” And I’d bend over my book again and turn the page.

Guv read all the time, lying on the bed holding a book over his face, or stretched out on a wooden bench in the bright sun of the backyard, no sunglasses. So this is how we read too: never properly, sitting nicely in a chair. We flopped on beds and couches; we locked ourselves in the bathroom for privacy and perched on the toilet lid. My favorite place to read was sprawled along the stairs, the book and my elbows planted on the hall floor at the top. My big brother Bobby read lying on his stomach on the living room floor, the newspaper spread out in front of him. He often took off his glasses and laid them on the rug so that he could more easily prop up his head with his hands, and if the twins and I were playing a game, chasing each other through the downstairs, shrieking, we had to jump at the last second to avoid trampling the glasses, as Bobby shouted, “Hey! Be careful!”

Guv’s desk was against the back wall of my parents’ bedroom, his lumpish typewriter centered firmly on a thick hairy mat that kept it from leaping around when he returned the carriage. He had bought the used typewriter in Quincy from an attorney who had accepted it as payment from a client, and we were all forbidden to touch it, though sometimes I did, sneaking into their room, gently depressing one of the ivory-capped keys, watching as the letter moved in slow motion toward the inky ribbon.

Next to the typewriter was a stack of yellow legal pads covered with Guv’s deeply slanted handwriting, notes from whatever he was writing at the time. He wrote for The Nation, and Catholic Digest, and North American Review, and one day he brought home several copies of the latest New Republic, which had his article about education on the cover, “More Money, More Learning?,” along with his name. He spread them out on the coffee table and got mad when none of us seemed to notice.

Screwed to one corner of his maple desk was a black plastic nameplate engraved with his name, which was also mine, in white letters that I liked to trace with my fingers: L. J. HERTZEL.

---

Laurie Hertzel was books editor at the Minnesota Star Tribune for fifteen years and now reviews for The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. This post is adapted from her new book, Ghosts of Fourth Street: My Family, a Death, and the Hills of Duluth, coming later this month from the University of Minnesota Press. Her previous book, News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, won a Minnesota Book Award.

Watch Laurie Hertzel, Booklist editor Donna Seaman, and Book Post editor Ann talk about book reviewing at Seminary Coop here! We also published reading recollections by Donna Seaman in 2024.

---

Subscribers can read our weekly Editor’s Notes in the Substack chat.

Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to our paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as free posts like this one from time to time to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Our paying subscribers support our work and receive our straight-to-you book posts. Some Book Post writers: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Jamaica Kincaid, Lawrence Jackson, John Banville, Marina Warner, Álvaro Enrigue, Nicholson Baker, Kim Ghattis, Michael Robbins, more.

Baldwin & Co, in New Orleans, is Book Post’s Winter 2025–26 bookselling partner! We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com. And support the Baldwin & Co nonprofit’s mission of leveraging the power of books to ignite social justice and inspire change with your donation or membership—or see if there are ways to support your local bookseller financially. Read more about Baldwin & Co here.

Follow us: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Notes, Bluesky, Threads @bookpostusa