I recently organized a couple of bookcases. In our former home I had reached Reader’s Nirvana/Self-Actualization/Bliss in that I had an entire wall of bookcases, floor to ceiling where on I had ALL my books displayed with ROOM FOR MORE.
I know it’s show offy just writing that. All of you with boxes of books in the basement/attic/garage/barn, just hang in there.
Since we moved to this house I’ve had a bit of trouble. Although there are plenty of built in bookshelves and several smaller bookcases, we left the huge wall and I haven’t achieved the order and organization that I had before. My books have been separated and stacked, then moved around and finally shelved only to be evicted when a room is repurposed to begin the whole process again. It’s a sort of reservation system gone awry and the saddest part is that the governing body (me!) is trying to pull everyone closer rather than banish them to the hinterlands. Where others have a library, I have a gulag.
We had some ceiling work done this summer which necessitated emptying a couple of bookcases and it gave me the opportunity to rethink our front entry. I had a small desk in an alcove on one side and a narrow bookshelf in a smaller alcove on the other side of the front door. The desk, though pretty and useful, was soon buried under stacks of papers and books. It was the first thing anyone saw upon entering our home. I also have a much larger desk upstairs which is more masculine than my small white desk, but it gives me room to spread out my junk and stack the books I always like to have at hand, as well as provides room for a comfortable chair. The white desk only afforded space for a narrow, wooden chair that makes my tailbone wince just considering it.
The narrow bookshelf was filled with memoirs and biographies as well as all my books on writing. Since my only desk is going to be upstairs, I wanted all these books there too. I decided to move a larger bookcase in the larger alcove where the desk was. The question became what books should should now reside there. I decided on fiction. How to divide fiction was the greater dilemma, but I settled on Americans on the narrow bookcase and anyone else on the wider case opposite, with the exception of the top two shelves that hold my collection of Modern Library and a shelf of small volumes (a set of Shakespeare’s plays, a partial set of Twain, the extremely old “Masterpieces of the World’s Best Literature” with the exception of Volume 2 and assorted copies of classics that were schoolbooks owned by my grandparents).
To make things easy on myself I decided, on the shelves devoted to fiction, to organize the authors alphabetically and not categorize the books in any other way. This has made some strange companions. An old Agatha Christie is next to “A Christmas Carol” and “The Joy Luck Club” is next to a newer, (taller) set of Mark Twain. The shelf pictured above is a jumble of old and new, paperback and hardcover. The slim paperback on the far left is a very light novel about a bed and breakfast but it discusses other novels, travel and food, which makes it a keeper, but only the author’s last name (Richardson) qualifies it to sit on the same shelf as “Gilead,” “Franny and Zooey” and “East of Eden.”
There are probably quite a few books in boxes and all my childhood books (that weren’t lost) are shelved upstairs, and yet I was surprised at how few novels I own. There are a variety of reasons for this: I tend to borrow fiction from the library and the novels I do buy I find much easier to part with. If I don’t want to read a book again, I get rid of it.
The memoirs, biographies, collections of personal essays and large set of history books that were on the narrow shelf are now stacked on the stairs. A lot of painting is going to need to occur in the schoolroom before they find their new home.
For now, I am pleased with my uncluttered entry and the sight of my cleanly, ordered books.
