The Rocking Chair Bookcase
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Rocking Chair Bookcase
The rocking chair bookcase Chester Cornett built looks like a throne or the driver’s seat of a UFO that is flown from Kentucky made of black walnut and hickory cut from the woods and carved to fit—
a rocking chair bookcase—just think of it, all the books you love rocking with you as you move a little back and as you move a little frontwards before the fireplace in the rocking chair bookcase
and no one wants to die and disappear without a trace and I don’t want to live another minute without a word of praise for the rocking chair bookcase and the invention of such a thing
Chester Cornett built in 1963 or ‘62 because he was a master craftsman and a genius too— walking in the woods with an axe and an idea so new it is the meaning of this place where
the invisible leaps out at you and you believe it and you carve and you carve until you see it and there it is—the fine-hewn fiddled-with evidence of grace built by Chester Cornett with the sweat
of his face, this beautiful thing one of the secret kings of Kentucky made whose lineage may as well go back to the ones who made fire spin and the wheel to blaze. O rocking chair bookcase. [End Page 12]
Steve Scafidi, a cabinetmaker who lives in West Virginia, teaches poetry in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
