ON MY SHELVES

First, I want to apologize for not posting anything in the last several weeks. In the last month I've been more of a reader than a writer. However, I have written a longish non-fiction piece about reorganizing my library. What follows is the beginning of this piece. By the way, comments are still very much appreciated for Boyhood, Manhood, Fatherhood, Death.

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Behind my desk, in my room, there is a large bookcase divided into twenty-five cubes, each measuring 33 by 33 centimetres. On the wall which my desk faces there are three bookshelves, each 120 centimetres long. Instead of a table, there is also a shelf on my bedside, this one 79 centimetres long. Beside my desk is an additional bookcase, the Billy model from Ikea, which holds six 76 centimetre long bookshelves. All this shelf space amounts to 1720 centimetres, or about 17 meters (a humbling number, when one thinks of the Strand bookstore, in New-York, which advertises its 18 miles of bookshelves).

So why have I turned my attention to my bookshelves and not what stands on them? Well, I am reorganizing my personal library, and so I need to know how much space I have for my books, in order to accommodate the existing space for a logical, efficacious, and personalized classification system for the books I own, which currently amount to just short of five hundred volumes.

I realize, of course, that my endeavour is not a very great one. I do have a considerable number of books, but by no means would I call my collection large or unwieldy. Even if there is little classification to my books as they now stand, it is still very easy for me to find anything I am looking for, taking at most a few leisurely minutes of skimming through titles. (Where on earth did I leave that Bukowski collection with the charming title of Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until Your Fingers Bleed a Bit? Ah, there it is, with a bunch of other thin, rebellious books. That hideous pale orange, how could I have missed it?) My library is in no way as large or needing as much of an overhaul as Susan Hill’s, who recently published Howards End is on the Landing, about her year spent reading from home, rediscovering the books she owns, which are scattered in dusty piles and rows everywhere in her house, an idea sparked by her search for Howard’s End. Forster’s book, apparently, was not on the landing, “but plenty of others were,” which sparked a year of rereads and discoveries.

I never finished Howard’s End is on the Landing — Hill’s pleasurable, gossipy tangents about her own life and authors she knows soon turn into the pedantic ramblings of a vain old lady stranded for too long in her mouldy country house (she lost me completely after stating that “with [Alice] Munro, the problem is Canada”, something about stories blurring together because of a sameness in characters) — but I still think the idea of taking out all the books you own from their shelves every once and a while and asking yourself “should I keep this one?”, “did I really enjoy this one?”, “have I finished this one?”, “where did I buy this one?” is an exercise that must be done in order to really know your library. I’m only twenty, and as such my library is not a lifetime’s library. It is only the nucleus of a true library, with burgeoning interests, mistakes, discoveries, a few treasures, and several shortcomings.

As for the organization of the books, well, I must say that in its current state the classification is far from optimal. Most of last semesters books are still on the shelf above my desk and deserve integration with the rest of my collection, instead of groupings by course reading material. My mass-markets, no matter the genre or author, are all together on the shelf above that, simply because I hate the format and ended up placing them above eye-level or easy reach. My French books are all together in my Billy bookcase, two shelves of ivory spines, which has an interesting effect, but also has the result of separating the Penguin edition of Chekhov’s Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, 1892-1895 from the French translation of Chekhov’s (or, as it were, Tchekhov’s) plays, published by Folio in two paperback volumes.

Similarly, the current state of my books creates rifts between ideas and eras, or tensions where there shouldn’t be any. For instance I have two large paperback volumes of collected poems, one of Ted Hughes, and one of Allen Ginsberg. They are both piled up on the shelf above my desk because I was too lazy to make room for them in the cubes behind my desk. So Ginsberg is a room apart from his friend Kerouac (if that shouldn’t be enough to bring them together, Ginsberg even took the pictures on the cover of On the Road, which I think calls for neighbouring spots on my shelves), and Hughes is very far from all of his Faber friends, Graham Swift and T.S. Eliot, and his wife Sylvia Plath. In the cubes there are other inconsistencies: Junot Díaz is between the single volume Chronicles of Narnia (which is itself separate from the individual paperbacks of the three first books, and the Spanish edition of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) and Anne Michaels, associations which hurt everything I stand for in literature; Hemingway shares his shelf with Amitav Ghosh, Toni Morrison, and Nabokov; The Castle of Otranto and The Monk are side by side (although separate from Frankenstein, Dracula, and Melmoth the Wanderer), but nearby stands poor Gabriel García Márquez and Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World, on the shelf above the actual Shakespeares.

At least some things make sense: Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, thankfully, stand side by side (and yet, I wonder if that is such a good thing — the two authors share incredible talent, popularity, Canadianness, and are also friends in real life, but do their books share enough stylistic and thematic elements to deserve a place together on my shelves?); John le Carré and Robert Littell are near each other (although divided by Neil Strauss, how he ended up between those two monuments of espionage literature I have no idea); the three volumes of His Dark Materials stand beside worn hardcovers of Shell Silverstein, which I find oddly fitting; while books by Manguel and Borges touch (when The Library at Night is there, anyway — more often than not it’s on my bedside shelf for easy skimming before going to bed, or lent to a fellow bibliophile, as it is now, at my girlfriend’s place, where she is savouring it chapter by chapter, as it should be). Yet, when I see Eco’s The Name of the Rose on one shelf and his collection of essays On Literature on the opposite wall; or The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, in the first Faber edition, isolated from the ugly Dover The Wasteland, Prufrock, and Other Poems and my second hand copy of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, I know it is time to take all the books out, dust off the shelves, and start again from scratch.