Building the Perfect Bookmas Tree

Books and trees; trees and books. You can have the oddest thoughts when you find yourself standing in the rain on a chilly December evening in Manhattan, alternately watching skaters tumble to the brilliant ice of Rockefeller Center's rink and studying a monumental Norway Spruce with its "30,000 environmentally friendly LED lights on five miles of wire."

I was in just such a position a couple of weeks ago, and for some reason I thought about the many Book Christmas Trees I'd noticed this year. They aren't a new idea (see a few incarnations here), but 2011 seems to have been unofficially designated the Year of the Bookmas Tree, with examples popping up everywhere I turn, including, naturally, bookstores (Murder By the Book, Houston, Tex.), libraries (West Virginia Library Commission) and publishers (Atria Books). GalleyCat offered a virtual "Book Christmas Tree Farm" slide show tour.

We don't usually have a tree in our house, but I did consider making a Bookmas Tree for us. The best I could come up with during some outdoor beta testing, however, was a minimalist, hybrid version I dubbed "A Book & a Nook Tree," inspired no doubt by Charlie Brown's classic underachieving nevergreen.

Then "what to my wondering eyes should appear" in my e-mail inbox but the vision of a 9.5-foot Bookmas Tree that currently occupies the four-story atrium of the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center at the University of Nevada, Reno. It was constructed using pre-1956 National Union Catalog volumes, "rarely used reference books [that] made an ideal book tree, with their evergreen covers and gold lettering on the spine," according to the library.

Conceived by librarian Erin Fisher, the project was executed by Alden Kamaunu, manager of the center's building operations, and library technician Larry Smith. They created two prototypes before coming up with a workable final design, which took three hours and 348 books to construct (You can watch a Flickr version of that process here).

The base of the tree was made of 10 books placed in a circle, and as the tree "grew," the number of books used diminished to a single volume at the top. "It had to be perfect," Kamaunu said. "It may look simple enough, but most book trees look like pyramids. We wanted ours to look like a real tree. There was a lot of trial and error." Although it has not been weighed, he estimated the book tree would hit the scales at more than 400 pounds.

That's Chase Duhon, a junior majoring in biology, standing in front of the Knowledge Center's Bookmas Tree, which is topped by an unusual, if apt, combo of the school's mascot Wolfie--in a tiny Santa Claus hat--and a Hawaiian-themed decoration. They earned this place of honor because the Nevada Wolf Pack football team will play Southern Miss in the Sheraton Hawai'i Bowl game on Christmas Eve (and Kamaunu is from Hawaii).

Angela Bakker, the university's communications and marketing specialist, said there have been plenty of "Wow, that’s awesome!" comments from visitors to the Knowledge Center, and many people have posed for pictures in front of it.

"If you think of it, we're returning the books to their original state. We had trees, which we turned into books, and now we're returning them back to their original form--a tree," said Todd Borman, an information technology specialist working at the center's help desk, which is located near the tree.

Books and trees; trees and books. Standing in the rain at Rockefeller Center earlier this month, I suppose I caught just a glimpse of that centuries-old relationship, and its connection to the spirit of a lifetime's worth of holiday seasons.
 
"Being now at home again, and alone, the only person in the house awake, my thoughts are drawn back, by a fascination which I do not care to resist, to my own childhood," Charles Dickens wrote in A Christmas Tree. "I begin to consider, what do we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our own young Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.

"Straight, in the middle of the room, cramped in the freedom of its growth by no encircling walls or soon-reached ceiling, a shadowy tree arises; and, looking up into the dreamy brightness of its top--for I observe in this tree the singular property that it appears to grow downward towards the earth--I look into my youngest Christmas recollections!" Happy Bookmas to all, and to all a good read.--Published by Shelf Awareness, issue #1632.

Knowledge Center photo by Claudene Wharton