It’s beginning to look as if the only way I can fit all my books into my house is to move myself out.
Why am I surprised? It’s not as if I haven’t lived here before. I know the equation: lots of tall windows plus two sets of French doors = beautiful light minus space for books.
But I’ve been away for a few years and I figured that, in my absence, the 32 boxes of books in my basement would go on a diet, similar to the one I was planning to adopt. I’d cut back on carbs and my books would jettison adjectives and weed out periphrasis (I’m looking at you, Victorian novels). They would also see some of their fellows off. I don’t need three biographies of E.M. Forster but don’t make me decide which two to give away.
Well, I’ve stuck to my part of the bargain! Okay, no, I haven’t. Hey, a girl needs carbs when she’s moving! But my books should have. I’ve been unpacking them all day and not one of them has shed so much as a page.
Andrew Marr’s A History of Modern Britain in paperback? Still 629 pages long. Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series? Still 13 books, but I don’t want to lose a word of them.
Unpacking books, unpacking memories
I don’t want to lose any words. Unpacking my books, I unpack myself, pulling out memories, influences, associations. The Betsy-Tacys were such an indelible part of my childhood that sometimes I think I sold colored sand and went through Deep Valley High School with straight hair.
And I was 13 or 14 when I first read Ishi in Two Worlds by Theodora Kroeber, the story of “the last wild Indian in North America,” and began to grasp the nature of the absence that has always haunted me in my country. Where are the signs of the past? What happened to the people who lived here before? (“Where are the Dunedain, Elessar, Elessar, why do thy kinfolk wander afar?” I don’t want to lose The Lord of the Rings either.)
I can’t even give up the books I know I’ll never read, including the five in Welsh. They belonged to my Welsh grandfather, in whose honor I’ve always intended to learn Cymraeg. And I will! Right after I start that low-carb diet.
Lured into a used bookstore
And then a friend lured me into a used bookstore last week, by the cunning expedient of murmuring, “Hey, Rhiannon, let’s go to the used bookstore”, and I found, just by casually browsing (though I had to crouch on the floor and crane my neck sideways), two boxed sets containing 11 Jeeves & Wooster novels. In hardback. With illustrations.
A pause to recall one of the immortal lines:
“You can’t go around London asking people to pretend to be Gussie Fink-Nottle …Well, you can, I suppose. But what a hell of a life.”
But Bertie’s life, however encumbered with Fink-Nottles, was a fast clip round the golf course compared to mine, because now, in order to make room for him, I’ve got to get rid of some books.
So it’s back to the boxes. Hmm. Le Morte D’Arthur, facsimile of the Third Edition with Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations. A very fat book that hasn’t lost a page since I bought it in 1972. And which, to be honest, I’ve never read. Can I live without it?
I’ll get back to you.
