Essay
The Well-Tended Bookshelf
By LAURA MILLER
Published: November 28, 2008
In order to have the walls of my diminutive apartment scraped and repainted, I recently had to heap all of my possessions in the center of the room. The biggest obstacle was my library. Despite what I like to think of as a rigorous “one book in, one book out” policy, it had begun to metastasize quietly in corners, with volumes squeezed on top of the taller cabinets and in the horizontal crannies left above the spines of books that had been properly shelved. It was time to cull.
I am not a collector or a pack rat, unlike a colleague of mine who once expressed the fear that he might perish someday under a toppled pile of books and papers, like a woman whose obituary he once read. I was baffled the first time a friend explained to me that the book in my hand was his “reading copy,” while the “collection copy” resided upstairs, in some impenetrable sanctum. Having reviewed hundreds of books over the past 20-some years, I no longer subscribe to the notion that I have a vague journalistic responsibility to keep a copy of every title I have ever written about. I am not sentimental.
Nevertheless, things had gotten out of hand. The renovations forced me to pull every copy off every shelf and ask: Do I really want this? I filled four or five cartons with volumes destined for libraries, used-book stores and the recycling bin, and as I did so, certain criteria emerged.
There are two general schools of thought on which books to keep, as I learned once I began swapping stories with friends and acquaintances. The first views the bookshelf as a self-portrait, a reflection of the owner’s intellect, imagination, taste and accomplishments. “I’ve read ‘The Magic Mountain,’ ” it says, and “I love Alice Munro.” For others, especially those with literary careers, a personal library can be “emotional and totemic,” in the words of the agent Ira Silverberg. Books become stand-ins for friends and clients. Silverberg cherishes the copy of Céline given to him when he was 19 by William Burroughs, while “people I’ve stopped talking to go out immediately. There are people whose books I refuse to live with.”
The other approach views a book collection less as a testimony to the past than as a repository for the future; it’s where you put the books you intend to read. “I like to keep something on my shelf for every mood that might strike,” said Marisa Bowe, a nonprofit consultant and an editor of “Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs.” At its most pragmatic, and with the aid of technology, this attitude can be breathtakingly ruthless. Lisa Palac, a freelance writer, and Andrew Rice, a public relations executive, ultimately chose their beloved but snug house in Venice, Calif., over their library. “We’d been lugging these books around for years, and why?” Palac wrote in an e-mail message. Her husband said, “Do we really need to keep that copy of ‘The Scarlet Letter’ from college on hand? I can order up another copy online and have it tomorrow if I need it.” They kept only one carton of books apiece, donating the rest to a fund-raising bazaar for their son’s school.
Older people, curiously enough, seem to favor the less nostalgic approach. When you’re young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you’re single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important. Most of them express no regrets, although Nicholson Baker, who wrote an entire book protesting the “weeding” of books and periodicals from American libraries, still mourns the collection of science fiction paperbacks he discarded in his youth. “I’m not good at it,” Baker wrote in an e-mail message when asked about his own culling. “When I’m doing research, I buy lots of used, out-of-print books, preferably with underlining and torn covers. I like watching them pile up on the stairs.”
For the most part, I’ve been pragmatic in my purging, and for years reference books were the most likely survivors. I needed them for work, for those occasions when I suddenly had to know at what age Faulkner published “Absalom, Absalom” (39) or the name of the Greek muse of lyric poetry (Euterpe). Now the Internet can tell me all that. Apart from the rare reference that’s worth reading in its own right, like David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film, these titles have been drifting away as the trust I’m willing to put in Wikipedia gradually equalizes with the faith I’ve invested in, say, Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia. (It doesn’t help that reference books tend to be shelf hogs.)
Nevertheless, most of the nonfiction I’ve kept consists of books I’ve already read and know I’m likely to refer to in my own writing. Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge has come in handy for more than one project, as has Carol J. Clover’s study of slasher films, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws.” In fiction, on the other hand, apart from a few choice favorites, the list is weighted toward classics I optimistically plan to get around to someday. Like John Irving, I hold one substantial unread Dickens novel (“Barnaby Rudge”) in reserve, for emergencies. This method has its pitfalls. The novelist Jonathan Franzen used to limit the unread books on his shelves to no more than 50 percent of the total. “The weight of those books seemed to represent a standing reproach to me of how little I was reading,” he said in a phone interview. “I want to be surrounded by books I love, although now sometimes I worry that it’s too familiar, what I see when I look around me, that it’s become a sort of narcissistic mirror.”
When it comes to novels, I’m probably too sanguine about what my future can accommodate. “Eventually the truth hits home,” Brian Drolet, a television producer in New York, told me. “As the actuarial tables advance, the number of books you’ve got time to read diminishes.” Dr. Johnson once said of second marriages that they represent the triumph of hope over experience. So, too, do my bookshelves. I have turned out to be less rational about this than I thought, and have made my library into a charm against mortality. As long as I have a few unread books beckoning to me from across the room, I tell myself I can always find a little more time.
4 comments:
This is an excellent piece.
I need to reflect further about what my bookshelves reveal about me. My gut says that it shows what I intend to read, but also something about who I am. I prefer fiction and serious works, not popular fiction.
What do your books say about you?
My books reflect my intellectual history, my past reading interests, and my current reading interests. I was a history major in college and I continue to read lots of history and so I have lots of history books!
Once I was interested in psychology and so I have lots of psych books although I seldom read psychology books any more.
I've always enjoyed biographies and so I have plenty of those!
These days I read more nonfiction than fiction (there are so many subjects I'm interested in mainly these days US history from say 1815 to 1920) and I would have to say I read more contemporary fiction than classical fiction.
I think my bookshelves represent my years in the classroom as an educator. I kept most of the books I taught in my English classes. Most of these are literature, but some are theory. In addition, I have many anthologies and collections of poetry. Thus, I would say that these books, while heavily bent towards English instruction, are quite varied.
As for pleasure, like Fred, I have many biographies and works of history. I must admit, however, that a great number of these relate to literature, as the biographies tend to be of literary figures and the histories tend to be of literary forms and other such subjects.
Having lived as a Southerner, my bookshelves also have an assortment of books from Southern writers. Prominent among these are Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Willie Morris, and Katherine Anne Porter. I also especially like Tennessee Williams.
I could go on with this topic, but I'll leave it at that for now.
Good post Fred!
I add to my previous comment that I like contemporary fiction. I have very little from before the nineteenth century, and probably most of my books are from the twentieth century.
Most of my books are American as well. I consider this a problem in my book collection. I am a strong believer in multiculturalism, and I recognize that I need to read more from authors of other countries. There are perspectives and issues out there foreign to America that I am too unaware of in literature.
Like Charles, I have kept a lot of my books from my English classes. I think these are a good reference. Sometimes I pick them up to refer to something.
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