The Bookshelf Saga
My wife says I'm a hoarder, but the term I use is bibliophile. Like many a reader before me, I can't help but accumulate books. Hey, I'm a writer, what can I say? It's part of my profession. We have thousands of them, perhaps enough to open our own bookstore -- the only problem being, I can't bring myself to part with any of them. Realistically, I know I'll never read the vast majority of them; and of those I've read, only a small number will ever be consulted again, let alone re-read. Yet I can't break myself of the conviction that I need them all. And not only that, I also need them to be readily available at a moment's notice. Which means that along with all the books have come many, many bookcases.
About a decade ago, when we still lived in humid Houston, I finally broke down and had a carpenter make built-in cases along one of the towering walls of our suburban home. He'd never done this before -- demand, apparently, isn't very high these days -- and lived in constant fear that the shelves would collapse under the weight of books. Therefore he over-engineered them in a big way, resulting in a bookcase gorillas could climb without causing so much as a creak. I was in heaven.
But we left Houston and the built-ins behind. Despite my bad experiences with particle-board shelves, I stocked up on as many IKEA bookshelves as I could fit in a truck, then spent about a week putting them all together. They get the job done, but that's about all I can say for them.
In theory, the IKEA shelves are easy to disassemble and move around. And they're better than a lot of other cheap bookcases I've used. Still, there's something about their impermanence that makes it hard for me to keep my books organized. After our most recent move, they've end up scattered all over the house, tucked next to one another in no order but that of acquisition, like so many sedimentary layers waiting to be explored by a future archeologist of taste.
One solution to a problem like mine is editing. If you love books, though, you know how hard it can be to part with them -- even the ones you don't particularly care for. Intellectually, I have made my peace with the idea of thinning the herd. The second solution might help in that regard: barrister bookcases.
Barrister bookcases aren't exactly new. Think of them as the original modular shelving, only they were built to last and not fall apart. A barrister bookcase is basically a stack of self-contained shelves. To move them, you just unstack the units. Traditionally they're made of solid wood -- in fact, you can still buy high quality wood units from places like Levenger -- but the ones that get me excited are mid-century Globe Wernicke shelves made of metal. We just bought a few:
I'm hoping to add more in the future. They're gunmetal gray with glass doors and a manufacture date of April 1963. Considering their age, they're in great shape. Since I only have eight shelves to fill, the question is which books to put in them. Maybe having to make that editorial choice will spur a larger purge of the collection? That's what I tell myself, anyway. If nothing else, it might help me find the books I use most often a little more easily.
