A thinning of the shelves
On Chesil Beach has left the building.
The upside of liking books, writing books, and working in the book industry is that I’m surrounded by them wherever I go in the house. The downside of liking books, writing books, and working in the book industry is that I’m surrounded by them wherever I go in the house.
As first world problems go, this is right up there with being unable to source low salt Marmite at Waitrose, but still it is a constant struggle to find room for new arrivals on bookshelves. I refuse to doublebank them (my parents have no such issues, madness I say, madness) and I’m not a great fan of slipping books horizontally on top of their vertically-shelved brethren. We also have cardboard boxes and boxes of them in the attic and slightly hidden around the house (many of these are children’s books which I’m hoping any grandchildren who turn up in the next few years will enjoy). On top of which, my children want to turn the basement – which is essentially a home library at the moment – into some kind of chillout zone. All of which means that it’s time, as it is roughly once a decade, to have a clearout.
Choosing what to wave an actual goodbye to rather than make a more non-committal au revoir is of course quite tricky (I’d strongly recommend I Murdered My Library, a Kindle Single available on Amazon by Linda Grant on this very subject). If I’ve read a book, I look on it for better or worse as a little accomplishment and it’s physical presence on my shelves is a proud reminder to me (and in my more narcissistic humble-brag moments to anybody else having a crafty glance along them) of a job well done. If I haven’t read a book, well, it’s not going anywhere until I’ve at the very least got to page 30. So to make this current purge easier to achieve, I came up with some categories of books that can go:
- Books I didn’t enjoy. There are a remarkable number of these on my shelves. Some are ‘classics’ so I feel obliged to keep them so visitors don’t think I’m an ignoramus, but there are actually a decent number that I’ll certainly never read again as I didn’t like them much/at all first time round. Quite a lot of Ian McEwan has gone, as have various Haruki Murakami titles. Sorry guys, it’s me, not you. There’s also a subset, books by authors I really like which I only bought on the strength of their name. So while I'm a huge fan of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon books, his other stuff, not so much, so cheerio.
- Books inscribed to me. A big wrench this one and I don’t want to go into detail for obvious reasons, but although I hugely appreciate people giving me their book and writing something personal and jolly in it just for me, if it’s not my cup of tea and I didn’t even ask for it in the first place then, after a suitably reverent interval, it’s going, going, gone. The bad news is that there are so few books that fall into this category that it doesn’t make much of a dent in the problem. Just to clarify, Sarah, all your books have survived the purification.
- Books I bought cheaply that I didn’t really want in the first place but were more of a donation to the church/school/etc fair. I’m looking, for example, at you Bring me Sunshine by Charlie Connelly. This doesn’t mean I think they’re bad books, just that they’re so far down the ‘to be read’ list that I’m pretty sure I’ll never get round to them.
- Books that are so damaged they’re basically unreadable. I think this is fair enough as they’re basically unreadable. Midnight’s Children is only kept together by several thick rubber bands, Wind in the Willows and Collected Short Stories by Somerset Maugham have lost their covers, Animal Farm’s glue has entirely packed up. Some people may disagree with this approach. A Beatrix Potter, kept because it’s a first edition, has got so much crayon scrawl on it that it’s worth nothing. It’s not even my own children’s scrawl which would at least make it ‘charming’.
- Doubles. For some reason I seem to regularly buy doubles of David Kynaston’s marvellous modern social history series Tales of a New Jerusalam. Ditto Flashman novels. Ditto Heart of Darkness. Ditto A Room of One’s Own. And I’ve just noticed that the banded Midnight’s Children is also a double. Farewell all.
Then there’s the issue of how to get rid of them.
There’s a nice little essay in one of my previous books, Shelf Life, all about this very subject, ‘On Destroying Books’ by Sir John Collings Squire. Squire (1884-1958) is best known today not for his sterling work editing the New Statesman and literary magazine the London Mercury, but as the inspiration for one of the finest pieces of comic writing about sport.
A leading light of the early 20th century Georgian movement of poets, he was the centre of a Bloomsbury-type literary group known as the Squirearchy. As ‘William Hodge’, the captain of a motley cricket team in AG Macdonell’s gently satirical England, Their England (1933) he plays a central role in the famous cricket match episode (and in a less flattering light appears as ‘Jack Spire’ in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall). Indeed, there were many strings to Squire’s bow. In 1922 he adapted Pride and Prejudice for the stage starring Ellen Terry, and two years later was one of the distinguished contributors to the royal mini-library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House (he wrote a special acrostic sonnet). The phrase ‘I am not so think as you drunk I am’ is attributed to him and he was also very keen on stilton cheese, suggesting a public monument to its creator be erected.
In ‘On Destroying Books’, Squire begins by considering the worth of the books donated to soldiers during the First World War before moving on to the problems of disposing of unwanted volumes. It was one of his pieces for his regular humorous Books in General column in the New Statesman, a collection of which was published in 1919 under the pseudonym Solomon Eagle, including essays on ‘Other People’s Books’ and ‘Moving a Library’.
Anyway, spoiler alert, Squire chucks them in the Thames. That seems a bit drastic. More than once, I’ve gathered together a box of books to give away, taken it downstairs to the hall where it’s stayed for a while, eventually moved it to the boot of the car, forgotten about it, then moved it back to the house when I’ve needed to get something in there more urgently, and eventually added it back to the pile in the loft.
I could sell them (there’s an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal by Christopher Lloyd along similar lines Saying Goodbye to My Parents’ Library) but I can’t be bothered frankly and most of them are really worth nothing. Indeed, I’m not sure if the charity shops I’m donating them all to are going to flog them or send them to pulp, but that’s out of my hands.
Long story short, three large boxes of books have now been literarily upcycled. Strangely though, surveying my shelves, it doesn’t look like I’ve actually freed up any more space.
Very prescient and wry observations Alex. Outstanding writing.
Ah, the 'box of books in the hall as source of domestic strife'