My Poor Library

Since I moved to a new apartment, a few years ago, my library has shambled into such disarray! A casual visitor to the place might only see lots of nice books in the wooden bookcases stained “Golden Oak” that I’ve had replicated over the years, but the actual order of the books is imprecise. And as someone who came of age as a kid by sneaking into the adult section of the local village library, and who later found literary sustenance in a multi-branch university library, I find this lack of precision spiritually unsettling, let alone inconvenient. True, nowadays I can do a lot more of my research online, but still, in the course of my day-to-day writing, I do actually consult a lot of the books that are sitting on my shelves, and most of them are usually easy to find. When I can’t find something specific and have to buy a replacement—rather, a duplicate—I somehow feel a failure.

The collection, use, display, and preservation of books has always felt kind of sacred to me. (I have always treasured that quote from John Waters: “If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em.”) I still have many of the art and decorative arts books I collected in college, in the late ‘60s, when I was studying architecture, as well as many of the history-of-English-literature standards that my partner then, an English major, encouraged me to read. I also have scores of the basic history-of books that I plowed through, one or two per week, when I came to New York in the ‘70s and realized that the study of architecture doesn’t necessarily tell you as much about Aristotle, Augustine, Darwin, Descartes, Freud, Kant and the rest that you really need to know, if you expect to have an engaged and happy life. At the same time, I tried to keep up with all the most interesting novels of the moment—essentially, anything The New York Review of Books said that I had to read. Then, as a magazine editor, covering the arts and culture, I was sent tons and tons of non-fiction books, about everything--art, theater, film, music, architecture, antiques, etc. And in that way my library, such as it was, just sort of accumulated.

Of course, now and then I got rid of a few things—had to get rid of. There were times when I was so poor—young magazine editors work for peanuts, you know-- that I routinely sold lavish art books at the Strand bookstore in order to have enough money to go down to Astor Place for a cheap haircut. (Luckily, there were enough lavish books produced about artists and movements I didn’t care much about.) Yet most of my library is still intact, except for three books that I lent friends over the course of the last forty years, that have not been returned. Yes, I do remember titles, and yes, I do remember the individuals who borrowed them (and their innocent promises to return the books), but no, I will not name names here.

The most significant reason why my library is in relative disarray is my move, a few years ago, from Brooklyn Heights, my home for some forty-five years, to Sunset Park. During the move I was writing on deadline, so I had scant time to get all my books properly unpacked and up onto shelves. Rushed, I threw categories of books into roughly cohesive sections—fiction, poetry, dance, decorative arts, etc.—but could not reproduce the precise, carefully executed shelving system that I had been using in the Heights: the standard Library of Congress system that I learned while working my way through Cornell in the university’s Olin Library. As you may know, the Library of Congress system divides all knowledge into twenty-one basic classes and numerous sub-classes; books are catalogued alphabetically by author, subject, and/or title, and shelved with oversize books down below and ephemera in specially-designated spots at the end of sections or sub-sections. Maintaining bookcase order based on that system was a small, subtle joy, all those years in Brooklyn Heights. And adding to today’s disarray is the lamentable number of book piles that are sprouting up in my apartment, since the bookcases are full, and the lamentably stupid system for organizing these piles: chronological. There’s the newest pile over there, and the formerly newest pile over there, and there’s the new pile that is now at least a year old…, and so on.

My dream--my golden, glowing dream—for when I move into my next home (which is likely to be my last, since I am 72), is to be able to really take the time, perhaps with the assistance of a young library specialist, to put my books back into the correct order, and to re-establish spots for the rotating display of suitably decorative, or rare, or special books, as I had in my old place. With my next home I will re-establish this display practice with the two books I had out when the packing for the move began: a massive, oversize offering from Taschen featuring Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, and a well-worn volume of Milton’s Paradise Lost, from the Library of Poetical Literature in Thirty-Two Volumes, published in 1902 by The American Home Library Company. The latter is from my grandmother’s library—a book that I tried to read again and again as a child, always surprised that this time the poetry was still not making sense, that I did finally read and understand in college, with the patient help of that English major….