'Bizarrely Eccentric Rules and Routines'

Everyone, I trust, is neurotic about something. We all have some micro-environment requiring micro-management. It’s a benign failing so long as it never escalates into the macro-scale. Take books. Mine I organize on the shelves by author and subject – that’s conventional enough – but within those loose categories I organize by size. I get itchy when I see volumes of widely divergent dimensions – dictionaries next to chapbooks – adjacent on a shelf. 

A friend sent me a link to this week’s Michael Dirda column in which the Washington Post writer reviews some of his bookish crotchets. “Over time,” he writes, “all readers acquire an array of personal, often bizarrely eccentric rules and routines that govern — or warp — how they interact with the printed word. . . . Perhaps you will recognize a few of your own.”

 

Dirda mentions his inability to listen to music while reading. That’s true for me as well. Nor can I have music going while I write. This is odd because for a quarter-century I worked in newspaper newsrooms, which are notoriously noisy places – police scanners, televisions, reporters complaining, editors arguing, reporters arguing, editors complaining. “I find this impossible,” Dirda writes, “which is why you’ll never see me working at a coffee shop.” Same here. I brew my own coffee.

 

Dirda and I share a number of dislikes: remainder marks, library-style plastic book covers, unremovable price stickers, and our refusal to read on electronic devices: “I’ve never,” he writes, “used a Kindle or any type of e-reader. I value books as physical artifacts, each one distinct. Screens impose homogeneity.” That one seems self-evident. I’ve never understood the ongoing fashion for e-books. The love of novelty or the latest gadget, I suspect. Perhaps my favorite agreement with Dirda is this:

 

“Buy only what you will read

 

“Mine is a personal library, not a focused collection. I never buy any book I don’t hope to enjoy someday. True collectors, by contrast, aim to be exhaustive and inclusive, gathering all sorts of material they have no intention of ever reading.”

Books are not for ostentation, vanity or home decorating. They’re more like tools. One of our neighbors has turned his garage into a clean, well-lit, perfectly organized woodworking shop, an environment I can admire and emulate. Books are not tchotchkes. I can conceive of rereading, some time, every book I own.