Old Fussface was a mule, and the droll stories in which he featured were incongruous with Grandpa’s somber demeanor. I don’t remember ever seeing Grandpa smile.

Old Fussface caused his owner, a farmer named Old Man Hanks, considerable trouble. Once Fussface bit off Hanks’ hand, for example, and it had to be tied back on with string. In another story, Hanks decided to replace Fussface with camels. I don’t remember what went wrong, but the experiment was unsuccessful.

According to family lore, Grandpa loved books from an early age, but was clumsy with his hands and singularly inept at farm work or any other kind of manual labor. Luckily for him, his mother kept chickens and saved her egg money for young Harry’s education. Eventually he became a Detroit lawyer and made a lot of money buying up land during the Depression.

Grandpa never stopped loving books. In his home library in what is now the Birmingham, Michigan, Museum, the shelves were full of very serious leather bound volumes, along with several young-adult novels by Horatio Alger. My favorites, however, belonged to Grandma, bound copies of 19th century ladies’ magazines left to her by her old friend Jenny Keyes. I would sit and read “Godey’s Lady’s Book” by the hour. Grandma, a pragmatic woman and not much of a reader, found this amusing.

My father said that after Grandpa died several crates of expensive books were found in his law office at Allen, Haas and Selander, the pages still uncut. Grandpa, according to my father, never took them home for fear of what Grandma would say.

Home libraries aren’t what they used to be. Books take up space and collect dust. People who once proudly displayed their collections, whether in antique glass-doored bookcases or on board and cinder block shelving, suddenly feel like those hoarders on reality TV. Who needs books? We have the internet.

“If you haven’t used it in six months, throw it away.” This contemporary rule of thumb seems harsh when applied to home libraries; but should you decide to reread “Grapes of Wrath” or “Profiles in Courage,” we have the Clinton-Essex-Franklin library system. So many bookstores have gone out of business, but there is always Amazon. Have you tried Kindle? And is it realistic to believe that someday you’re going to finish “Ulysses?”

I once told my sister that I admired her husband Tom for mastering both James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.”

“Tom never read ‘Ulysses!'” she said. This, despite the fact that for years the fat volume occupied a prominent place on their living room bookshelves. “NO ONE has ever read “Ulysses!”

My first husband and I, both of us English majors, also displayed a copy of Ulysses in our bookcase, but neither of us was ever able to get through it. Next to it was my first volume of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel, “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” in French, which I have never read, even in translation.

“But,” I recently told my sister, “I do have a Madeleine cookie baking sheet, unused.”

“Same here,” my sister said.

“La Recherche,” a madeleine dipped in tea brings back a powerful childhood memory. A Proust madeleine moment is the evocation of a long-lost memory, usually triggered by a smell, taste or sound.

No matter how much you love and value your books, you are bound to love and value them less when you are moving, especially if you are downsizing. Books are heavy; Old Fussface and his wagon would come in handy.

My father and I both loved Donald Barthelme’s fiction, which critics called playful and postmodern. I was reading a Barthelme story in the “New Yorker” when I experienced a sort of madeleine moment. I had read the exact same story in the 1850 “Godey’s Lady’s Book!” Nowhere was the original author or publisher given credit for the story, nor was it even described as found art. I checked. Playful and postmodern are all very well, I thought, but is this legit?

Je crois que non.

Have a good week!

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the News since 1996.)