Bookshelves and reality
A few days ago this email conversation occurred with my friend Tasmin, who is another writer. Another somewhat (ahem) book- and space-challenged writer.* She’s spent a lot of time (and money) over the last year or so in turning the second parlour in her old farmhouse into a library**, and now, finally, with the shelves in, she is beginning to unpack.
I asked her if I could use her email and my reply as a blog entry because I felt that rather a lot of you would understand what happened next. Indeed, will have already predicted what happened next. She graciously agreed.
And so I began, in true sympathetic, supportive friendship mode:
I’m not laughing. I’m NOT laughing. I’m NOT LAUGHING! MMMMMRMMMMMRRRRMMPH
—–Original Message—–
From: Tasmin Hohenzollern
Sent: 18 January 2010 23:09
To: Robin
Subject: Bookshelves are INADEQUATE
I know that you will understand this.
I’ve just about got the library bookshelves crammed full, and I have books that are Not On Shelves. Boxes of them. Thirty or forty boxes of them. “Oh, quelle surprise!” I hear you cry.
That would be pretty much what I’m crying, yes. Mmmmmrmmmrrrmph.
This is going to make me cull and cull again. Unfortunately it’s a slow process, culling.
Yes. You suddenly realise you have a crick in your back, need a pee, and are dying for a fresh cup of tea/coffee . . . and it’s two hours later, and you’ve been reading a book you decided two hours ago to cull. Yes?
Why, just this morning I got rid of PAVILION OF WOMEN by Pearl S. Buck and two of the three (why? Who knows?) copies of JANE EYRE.
Uh . . . I have several copies of JANE EYRE. I often have several copies, particularly different editions, of favourite books (aside from the dozen or so different editions of LOTR), and JANE’s definitely a favourite. Why should a good friend have only one suit of clothes?
At this rate it will take me… um… mathematically challenged, remember?*** this may take a moment or two… YEARS to reconcile the books with the space available on the bookshelves.
Yep. I still probably have a couple of months before I get to play this game at Third House. Atlas is Building Shelves now.†
Unless I make a clean sweep of the more prolific authors – Edgar Rice Burroughs, say, or Lovecraft, or Fay Weldon -
Not Lovecraft! Not Lovecraft!!! –But if you stick to just him, it’s not so bad. You can get rid of all the Derleth etc.†† I cut Edgar††† back in Maine–and I never developed the Weldon habit.‡
there is going to be a major, MAJOR space shortage.
Yep. Reality. Don’t worry, it’s just reality. Happens to all of us. Like breathing. Shortage of bookshelves. Breathing.
There are Too Many Books (and mind you, I haven’t even touched the contents of my office upstairs, or the bookshelves in my room or the one in the guestroom or the ones on the landing. Sigh. THERE ARE TOO MANY BOOKS!
There are NEVER too many books. THAT’S the problem. Shortage of bookshelves and breathing is just the way life works, badly planned and built as it is.
And that’s not even counting the many boxes of my own books – something I’ve always been religiously opposed to keeping around the house, but when you buy up the copies before they’re remaindered, well, damn, there they are, first they cost you money and then they’re right in your way in the form of a stack of boxes. Eek.
Oh, well, I DO keep backlist in boxes. You weren’t fantasizing wasting shelf space on BACKLIST were you?!? Are you feeling quite well??
Perhaps you should plan to come and spend a week or two helping me cull. It’s always much easier to cull other people’s books (and then you can take lots of them home with you, heheheheh).‡‡
Yes, THAT’s why it’s easier to cull other people’s books! I KNOW that scam!!!!
Doesn’t that sound like a lovely holiday? And just think how you would enjoy convincing me that I don’t actually NEED twenty different editions of specific books… only, of course, I DO.
Well, I think twenty might be the upper limit. Except for LOTR. And possibly JANE EYRE.‡‡‡
[Here ends the amusing bit of the email. The rest of it trails away into mutual inquiries about the behaviour of respective domestic fauna, meteorlogical insults, the inexplicable behaviour of publishers, etc.]
* * *
* Is there another kind? Well, Peter might be another kind, only he married me.
** Which is to say she too went through the Weight-Bearing Floor follies. She, however, was only dealing with the ground floor. No fabulously expensive additional staircases were demanded of her. No perfectly respectable second bedrooms were turned into cupboards with stairs running through them.
*** He has also begun building the brick planter in front of the cottage. So that the next time some moron in an SUV swings grandly out of the driveway across the road^ and slams into my pots, it’s going to hurt him a lot more than it hurts me. For a change.
^ Note that these are not my neighbours themselves, but they hang out with some overvehicled riffraff. The thing that totally gets up my nose is that for the four big, heavy pots I’ve lost . . . not one person has ever knocked on my door and said, Er, I’m really sorry but . . . And no, there is no way they can’t have noticed. These are—were—big heavy pots. Grrrrrr.
† Yes. Tasmin and I have a lot in common.
†† I can be cruel and decisive when there’s no longer space for . . . a bed^, say, and a kettle to boil water for tea.
^ In extreme circumstances, hellhounds could sleep on the bed.
††† Cruel! Cruel! Cruel! Especially toward writers who write by the yard. I got rid of my 1,000,000 E Phillips Oppenheim at the same time.
‡ I’m a cow, remember? Moooooo.
‡‡ Yes, I know. This is what happened the last time I visited Tasmin.
‡‡‡ And . . .
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