Downsizing a personal collection of books is not an easy feat for a booklover. More accuractely, it is probably a task that most booklovers procrastinate at or avoid at all costs! Just the thought of removing books from my shelves to place into storage bins gives me anxiety... let alone contemplating CULLING any.
Today, we welcome
Lynn Sloan, author of the recently released
This Far Isn't Far Enough, to the blog as she shares her recent experience with doing just such a thing:
The Wisdom and the Folly of Downsizing a Library
“So these’ll be gone, right?” George, the house painter, nods
at the long wall in my bedroom of floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded with books.
Like all avid readers and most writers, I have books in
many rooms—cookbooks, in the kitchen, obviously; local history and poetry in
the living room, less obviously; in my office, predictably, dictionaries, style
guides, books I turn to for inspiration; in my workroom, reference books, books
I mean to read, and books I’ll never read but can’t give away because of the
giver; in the den, art, more art, photography, travel, history, essays, film
studies; and so on.
The books that really matter to me are in my bedroom. George,
sizing up the job ahead, and I look at them, me with affection, George with a
baffled, who-needs-books expression.
I am a fiction writer. Most of the novels and short story
collections that I’ve read in the last twenty-five years are here, in my most
private, intimate space. No book goes on these shelves unless I read it to the
end. Non-fiction I’ll read on my digital devices, but books of fiction I want
to hold in my hand as objects; I want to turn their paper pages; I want to
write in the margins. When I became a fiction writer, I gave up borrowing novels
and story collections from the library and started buying them as a way to support
living authors and the legacy of the dead, so this twenty-foot-long wall of
books has become a three dimensional record of my history as a reader of fiction.
Arranged in alphabetical order by author, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize
winners alongside out-of-print, mid-twentieth century British Penguins,
hardbound books written by my personal favorites, cherished volumes from
friends, soft with many readings, peeling pulp paperbacks with lurid covers bought
secondhand. Books stacked in front of other books, groaning shelves, a
twenty-foot long wall, my most personal library.
I assure George, the painter, that I will deal with the
books before his crew arrives.
*
The painters were due. It was time to box up my books.
I’ve done this before. I’ve boxed and moved books from
college to my first apartment, which is why I still have my musty copy of English Poetry and Prose of the Romantic Movement,
to my next apartment, and the next, to one fixer-upper house after another, to my
current beloved cottage. Books have made the journey with me. My bedroom wall
of books is personal.
These are the books that have entertained me, challenged
and taught me, and sustained me. But I have too many books. The shelves are
double-stacked. I don’t even know what’s behind the visible rows of books.
I drag out boxes, dusting rags, and the stepladder. Amis,
Kingsley and Martin, Atkinson, Atwood, Austin—my eyes drift over the faded
spines, past Richard Yates, and two bottom rows of Best American anthologies. Many of these familiar friends I haven’t
opened in years. Do I need them any more? Which of them will I ever read again?
I have so many books that I sometimes hesitate to buy new books, and so many
good books are published all the time.
I decide to keep only those books I truly expect to read
again. Most of Kingsley Amis I save, none of Martin Amis. I keep Atkinson’s Life after Life and God in Ruins, set aside her Brodie mysteries for a mystery-loving
friend, the others go in a stack for the public library’s sale. I move through
the As and on to the Bs. Each decision is tough. Baxter, Berlin, keep, most of
Brookner, to the library. I persist. Each book that I have loved tests my
resolve, but if I figure I’m not going to read it again, out it goes onto the
library pile. Soon the library pile becomes several piles. I am ruthless. My
book-loving husband walks in and is shaken.
“Are you sure?”
Such a question is no help. If I weaken, I’m doomed. Ahead
I envision a beckoning openness, not dusty yellowing volumes from the past, but
a spacious and blooming future.
I have three hundred hardbound books and eighty-three
paperbound books to give away. I am exhausted, and I am content.
The painters do their work. We move back in the bed, the
bedside tables, the lamps, the reading chair, but the shelves remain empty. I
want them to dry thoroughly before I bring in the books.
On a sunny day, I carry in the boxes and begin. I’m glad
to see my old friends. Each volume seems fresh and new. Some authors’ works I
place sideways so the titles can be read easily. Here and there I leave space
for new acquisitions. When I step back to review the result, it looks as if an
interior decorator has been at work, arranging the books just so, in other
words, my wall of carefully chosen books does not look like my library. What I
have left is a skeleton, the remains of a formerly living organism. I try not
to be disappointed. I try not to obsess over the Veronica Gengs and the Malcolm
Muggeridges, the Tom Rachman, the Téa Obreht, the four hundred books I gave away. I want them
all back.
I avoid looking at that wall in my bedroom for weeks,
until one day I need to look up a passage in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Guided by my
old penciled notes, I find what I’m looking for. Delighted that I’d saved this
book, happy that the process of finding what I wanted was so easy, I pull down nearby
books. They are full of notes I’d written in the margins; inside the back cover
are thoughts I’d had and connections I’d made between passages. I discover
bookmarks from now-closed bookstores. I remember buying each of these books,
some in distance towns, and most near home. Each book tells not just the
author’s tale, but my mine too.
Opposite the passage I’d gone looking for in Interpreter of Maladies, I found, “It
was only then . . . that I knew what it meant to miss someone . . .”
I miss the books I gave away. I’m happy to have lots of
free space on my shelves to fill with new books and new experiences, but I miss
what I no longer have. It will be years before I have to face downsizing again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lynn
Sloan is a writer and photographer. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares,
Shenandoah, and American Literary Review, among other publications,
and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of the novel Principles
of Navigation (2015 Fomite), which was a Chicago Book Review Best
Book in 2015, and the newly released short story collection, This Far Isn't
Far Enough (Fomite, 2018). Her fine art photographs have been exhibited
nationally and internationally. For many years she taught photography at
Columbia College Chicago, where she founded the journal Occasional Readings
in Photography, and contributed to Afterimage, Art Week, and Exposure.
She lives in Evanston, Illinois with her husband. Learn more at http://www.lynnsloan.com/
