The Real Thing

This has long been my favorite Maxfield Parrish painting.  It is titled "The Cardinal Archbishop" and was originally an illustration for a short story in the first few years of the twentieth century.  I now have a copy of the painting, bought on ebay.  It's the illustrated page from the book - just the page.  What a shame that someone tore the page from the book to sell separately.  I'm afraid the book, the story itself, probably ended up in the garbage.  A few weeks ago, I started searching online for the story.  Our library system has one copy  (not illustrated by Parrish but...just the story) and I reserved it.  This one copy is housed in the big main library in Minneapolis so I knew it would take about a week to arrive at our local branch.  In all these years, I've never even thought to look up the story and now that I had, I felt very impatient to read it.
And then, searching a bit more, I found a digital copy - a free digital copy - that I could download and read on my phone.  Talk about instant gratification.  So I did it.  And I read it.  Then I was done. And that was that.
About a week later, I received an email telling me that the book I'd reserved was in at our local branch.  I felt guilty knowing that someone had searched the stacks in the downtown library to find this book for me, someone else had put it on the transport vehicle, someone had driven the book out to our local branch, and then yet another someone had matched it up with my library number and shelved it for me to pick up.  I had already read the story.  So, I could just let it sit there on the shelf and then when the reservation expires, the whole chain of someones would have to get the book back downtown and back into the stacks.  But no, I couldn't do that.  So I went to pick it up.  And, oh what a surprise.

This beautiful little red book was waiting for me on my shelf.  No tacky spine stickers, no ugly plastic protective book jackets.  Just this worn little book.  And then I opened the front cover:

And I checked that precious book right out of the library.  And I've renewed it twice.  Which means I can only renew it one more time.  It will be hard to return it.  I wonder how long it has sat on a shelf downtown, unread.  Or maybe it's been read a ton.  But I'm guessing probably not.  I'm rereading it - the real way this time - not on my phone (for goodness sake, what was I thinking?!)