I’m trying to kill my library. Not the Fayetteville Public Library, my own stash. They sag shelves in the living room, dining room, sunporch, office, two bedrooms and the laundry room of our manse, Shady Hill. We’ve lived here eight years, and it’s time for painting the walls, even behind the books.
A gallon or three of latex will even everything out, although books — and what house is not improved by a scholarly look? — form an expensive wallpaper. At $5 to $35 per spine, you get a strip of around 1 by 8 inches.
Neither My Beloved nor I buy that many books — we do hit the FPL almost weekly — but in the few decades of our still-young lives, we’ve gathered a few hundred volumes. Why am I keeping them (just referring to my books, not hers)? It could be ego. It shows an extravagance that is laudable in its utility and intellectual delight. It has an arrogance that is forgivable by boasting of learning. Even people who buy instead of borrow romances and mysteries can proudly proclaim that they don’t spend all of their free time watching television.
Books can become a burden. This is not quite true. In moving, lugging 18 heavy book boxes isn’t much more of a chore than 12 of them. They cause no harm on sturdy shelving. Yet maybe there is an extreme. Ninety to 99 percent of them I will not open again. This excludes reference books, among which I count Bible translations and cookbooks.
Which 1-10 percent? That’s been the project of two sweaty, dusty afternoons on stepstools. About once a year I cull, removing about three books. This past week I created an intermediate step, for which I bought some Bankers Boxes at Sam’s Club. Each box is being labeled “Store for year? 5/07-?” The plan is that I’ll put books I doubt I’ll open in the shed. Any book that I have even the slightest urge to bring back inside is a keeper. Next May, the others will have proven to have outlived their usefulness.
I’ve packed two boxes like that, and two others that will go directly to Dickson Street Books. The ones they don’t buy will be donated to Friends of the FPL. Lots of books are left inside. MB says that’s OK, even though some have not been cracked since college, meaning bookstore to shelf to box to shelf to box to shelf for a lot of moves.
This particular hoarding is a form of sentiment. Just the packed-together spines of novels and histories, biographies and philosophies, revitalizes me daily, in walking past them without looking up.
They’re trophies, fossilized successes, old news. Would I really prefer blank walls of “wheat grass,” “ancestral gold,” “friendly yellow” — depending on the room — with trim in “ionic ivory”? Maybe a few books. A few hundred. -30-
