Over-Booked?

In today's L.A. Times "Home" section, Carol Mither's ( "When You're Buried in Books") talks about readers who are passionate about books-- and don't know where to store them.

PEOPLE who fall in love with books usually do so early in life, long before they consider issues of interior design. At some point, though, the ability to live with cinderblock bookshelves ends, leaving bibliophiles with massive collections, nowhere to put them — and nowhere to turn for advice.

The collections of true book lovers — scholars, writers, editors, collectors or just insatiable readers — look nothing like this.

For one thing, the numbers are staggering. Doug Dutton, owner of Dutton's Books, reportedly owns 15,000 volumes; the late Susan Sontag had 20,000. And the books come in all sizes, colors and conditions, some so pawed-over that hardcovers are limp and tattered and paperbacks frayed, scribbled-on and coffee-stained.

True book lovers, says Mithers, don't look for aesthetically pleasing bindings that coordinate with the other furnishings in the room. Books are about the stories on the pages, about the memories they elicit. About passion.

The roots of that passion are simple. To these readers, books aren't mere objects but possessions that carry intensely personal memories: where they were purchased, who the reader was while reading them, how they changed his or her life. They carry a weight of history.

Some of my books are from my college days. Works by Kurt Vonnegut, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Joyce's Ulysses, and five texts that attempt to explain its mysteries.

I was first introduced to Ulysses by a college professor I idealized. He turned out to have feet of clay. A few years later, in my UCLA graduate school Joyce seminar, I wrote my M.A. thesis comparing the nighttown chapter in Ulysses with a section in Heller's Catch-22. (I keep promising myself that one day soon, now that the years have--I hope--added maturity and keeness of observation, I'll reread Ulysses with greater understanding....) I was newly pregnant when the seminar began, in my ninth month when it was over. During my Masters orals, one of the instructors rushed to get me a chair--he was clearly nervous that I'd go into labor if I had to stand, which is the usual protocol.

Catch-22 has its own memories...a romance that blossomed and then soured. Ditto the Collected Works of T.S. Eliot. Different boyfriend...

Books I wish I'd kept:

Marjorie Morningstar, which I read as a teenager, hiding the book so that my parents wouldn't know.

Gone with the Wind, which kept me company while I stayed home from school with the measles.

Some of my books recall my teaching years. Huckleberry Finn, filled with notes and underlinedpassages, like the heartbreaking scene in which Jim tells Huck how he discovered that his daughter was deaf. Hamlet. The Count of Monty Cristo. A Tale of Two Cities.

So many more...

Mithers asks: Can one have too many books?

The story of Anthony Cima is the book lover's nightmare: The 87-year-old stuffed 10,000 books into a one-room San Diego apartment, and when a 5.4-magnitude earthquake hit just off the coast of Oceanside in July 1986, he was buried beneath them and barely survived.

Most of the books in the three almost-to-the-ceiling wood bookcases in my study toppled during the Northridge earthquake. I had completed the manuscript for Angel of Death the night before the quake struck. When the sun rose, I searched beneath the piles of fallen books for the manuscript--it was nowhere to be found.

Then I remembered: I'd taken it upstairs with me before I went to sleep, and had tucked it under my bed.

Mithers also raises some issues that are subjects of debate:

Is it acceptable to double-stack books to fit more in a small space? "Some people think so, but I'm totally opposed," says Dana Polan, who teaches history of cinema at USC and lives with a wife and about 4,000 books in a Santa Monica apartment. "Every book has to be visible — even if it only cost 99 cents."

Oy. I have to admit that I double-stack--and sometimes, with my paperbacks, triple-stack. It's not ideal, and I have to pull out books to find the one I'm looking for. But I've run out of space. Periodically I go through my collection, trying to find books that I can part with. There are few.

More questions that Mithers addresses:

How high can a bookcase go? When you marry or cohabit, do you merge collections, disposing of the duplicates? What happens to collections in case of divorce? Is it OK to fill every inch of the house with books? Should books always be kept on shelves or is accumulating a bedside stack acceptable?

I have a bedside stack. My nightstand would look neater, perhaps, but naked without a book. Aside from the books in my study, my husband and I have books in the family room, in the guest room, one in the guest bathroom (a Tolkien). There are stacks of books beneath my desk--the ones I brought home from Book Expo and haven't had a chance to store elsewhere.

Comments

[rabbi neil fleischmann]

I'm trying to clean up this summer and books are hard to let go of. But there is what to be said for space...

[Pearl]

I have to update my recent comment... I was speaking to my mother yesterday and she said that she was looking at the bookshelves at my childhood home. There were SO MANY of my books, with my name in them, some of them schoolbooks, some from university, where I majored in English literature...when would I take them home with me? "You have a bookshelf or two, don't you?" "Ummm, okay, Mom...I'll take them."
I couldn't help but silently think of your post when I spoke to my mother, and of my first comment. I guess the tall book stacks might soon be making an appearance at my house!

[Perel]

This has been a problem of mine for years, and I'm kind of young yet. Slowly but surely, my books have seeped over cardboard crates in my closet, shelves on my dresser, and boxes under my bed. Combine that with the thousands of pages of my own writing which, however horrible, I refuse to let die, and you have a real roommate turnoff.

I don't know. My parents like to keep a reasonable amount of books on the shelves upstairs, and the unseemly surplus hidden away in some secret library in our basement. You were probably looking for a better solution though, weren't you? (;

[Rochelle]

Pearl, I love the stories in Malamud's The Magic Barrell. I'm particularly taken with the title story, and taught it in my AP English classes.

Thanks for reminding me about it.

[Rochelle]

A great idea about the plank of wood. Alas, my paperback shelves aren't tall enough...

[Susan]

If your shelves are deep and high enough, you can put a thick plank of wood in the back, which will raise pbks. enough that you can usually tell which titles are there without having to move all the ones in front.

I keep books because I'm a rereader, which so many of my friends don't understand. I, on the other hand, can't understand how someone can read a good book only once. It's all very well to say that they're available in the library, but when it's 11 p.m. and you need the comfort of a particular read, you'd best have the book in your own house.

[Pearl]

I have managed to weed out some of my vast collection of books; I thought emotionally it would be more difficult to do -- but I realized that space was of the essence. Not all the books I owned were keepers. But among those that remain on my shelf are an autographed copy of Mordecai Richler's "Joshua Then and Now"; Bernard Malamud's "The Magic Barrel" -- bought March 1982; I.J. Singer's "The Family Carnovsky" -- bought in Haifa in January 1984; "Call It Sleep" by Henry Roth -- bought in July 1981; a personalized, autographed hardcover copy of Herman Wouk's "The Hope".
One of the mainstays in my book collection is "Night" by Elie Wiesel, bought and studied when I was in 9th grade, later studied when I was in high school, and again studied when I was in university. Inside the book's front cover are index cards with brief points of a presentation I did about the book when I studied it at some point. That book has meant something concrete and real to me since I first picked it up. Each reading of it only accentuated its significance. It is a book I do not plan to part with.

If you get "a chance" to read it, read "Walking Home" by Gloria Goldreich (MIRA BOOKS, early 2005 pub date); I think I might've mentioned it to you in L.A., saying how taken both my mother and I were with the story.