“[M]y library is as
unsystematic as my mind, an assemblage of old favorites to which I return
repeatedly in search of pleasure and/or edification.”
The neurotic part of my
brain, roughly 53.2 percent of it, is nagged by the unsystematic arrangement of
my books. Certain writers are appropriately clustered – all of Boswell and Johnson,
all of Guy Davenport, Chekhov and Joseph Epstein -- and share shelves accordingly. But from my
desk I can count thirteen books about World War II on five scattered shelves. Joseph
Conrad is shelved not with Henry James and Ford Madox Ford but Polish
literature. It comes down to finite shelf space. The number of volumes is again
inching closer to three thousand. Books stacked horizontally are starting to
obscure those standing upright, but at least I’m not yet piling them on the
floor, he said, rationalizing.
The good news is I’m seldom unable to find the book I’m looking for. This corresponds to another useless knack I possess. When I read a passage in a book I want to mark or transcribe for future use and I’m too lazy to get a pencil, I have the idiot-savant-like ability to remember the page number and where on the page the passage is located -- a rare gift granting me no known evolutionary advantage.
At the top, the late Terry
Teachout is replying to a request from National Review to describe his “personal
library” – a phrase he objects to, as I do. “I buy what I expect to enjoy,” he
writes, “and keep what I expect to reread, and that’s the size of it.” If I
possess only one book by a given author, not counting the Bible, it likely
means that writer is not a favorite and I would happily give it away to an
appropriate reader. I’m an aspiring, never-realized completist.
Another writer, Richard Brookhiser,
notes that “the Brookhiser Decimal System depends on memory.” As does the Kurp
counterpart. Joseph Epstein has twice culled his library for reasons of space. “Each
time, like the detached tail of the iguana,” he writes, “it grew back.” I hope
none of this comes off as bragging. I’ve never measured myself by what I own nor
tormented myself with what I don’t own. Except for books, I’m not acquisitive
and don’t covet bright shiny things. As Peter J. Travers puts it:
“A library is a humbling place, speaking caution through its record of perfidy and foolish presumption. It also is a place of hope, reminding us that we can learn, if we would.”
2 comments:
The bookshelf times average number of shelves times average number of books on shelves method give me a total of around twelve thousand. They are in every room of the house except the bathroom (books and damp air are a bad mix). It would be difficult to get a matchbox car into the garage, much less a full-size model, as the central space is a "room" built out of bookshelves. There are no complaints from my wife; when she first met me in middle school and got a look at my room, in which books were piled in stacks on the floor and obscured the mirror over my dresser, she knew what she was getting into.
Lamb's contemporary Southey moved to Keswick and unpacked his abundant books.
In a letter, he described the scene: “I can scarcely find stepping places through the labyrinth, from one end of the room to the other. Like Pharaoh’s frogs, they have found their way everywhere, even into the bedchambers.”
Dale Nelson
Post a Comment