Shelf Life

Today's discussion of bookcases and the shelves therein caused this blogger to search his memory for the approximate date when he was gifted with a Kindle e-reader and never again purchased a dead-tree book. From that date forward, not a single volume was added to any shelf in his three bookcases. Instead, every single book since the Kindle arrived exists in a virtual library in the amorphous storage area in cyberspace known as "the cloud." The blogger can go to his virtual library by logging in to the Amazon web site and selecting "Manage Device and Contents" from a dropdown menu. In the blink of the eye, the blogger is shown a list of every book he has purchased from Amazon and can choose to view the list of more than 1,000 books by Title (A to Z or Z to A), Author (A to Z or Z to A), or Acquired Date (Oldest-Newest or Newest-Oldest). In addition there is a Search option accepting even single words or terms. If this is (fair & balanced) environmentally-sound book-collecting, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Virtues Of Shelf-lessness
By Sloane Crosley


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aesthetics alphabet animal apartment arctic around arranged association Babel bedroom beneath books born chair collector conversation footage fox full genre hope Isaac John ledge library literature maybe method mind news objects order otherwise people pyramid really relax seems sentimental sit size spirit tables taste think tradition TV virtues writer years

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There’s not a single bookshelf in my apartment. You heard me. On the surface this makes me a Philistine, a traitor to my profession and sexually unviable according to John Waters, who has cautioned against going to bed with people who don’t own books. There’s a look that passes over the faces of those who hear this confession: It’s a combination of shaming and hope, as if perhaps there’s video footage somewhere of me eating all my books because I lost a bet. The bad news is there is no such footage. The good news is there’s no need to panic. I own as many books as you’d expect a writer to own. I just don’t have any place to put them.

As a result, I’ve put them all over the place. In cabinets, on night stands, beneath tables, as tables. But the vast majority exist above my head. Snaking around my apartment are moldings, little ledges that extend a few inches from the wall and a couple of feet shy of the ceiling. They are decorative dust collectors, born to fall under a broker’s definition of “charm,” but I have inflicted utility upon them in the form of a library. A library that lords over me 24 hours a day in a single-file chain. This arrangement is often a conversation piece with guests — less because they’re admiring my impeccable taste and more because there’s really nowhere to relax in my apartment without risking a concussion. But what began as a default storage option has over the years evolved into an ideal method of book organization.

But first, if I may, a note on all the other methods. In recent years, there’s been a rejection of the stodgy old alphabet in favor of organizational principles driven by color, size and genre. I blame online shopping. Aesthetics in literature are important, but literature as aesthetics makes me nervous. When did a candle-topped pyramid of paperbacks become a symbol of depth? If you line up your novels in rainbow order but don’t Instagram them, were they ever really there? Before the 16^th century, books weren’t even shelved with their spines out. The horror. To me, arranging books solely by size makes sense only if you are a collector of art monographs. Otherwise, it seems needlessly emasculating for the smaller editions. Genre I can get behind, but with genre comes oversimplification. Imagine if I told you to place all of your hard objects in the bedroom and all of your soft objects in the bathroom. You’d end up with a tub full of pillows.

Which is why my library is what I call a “sentimental library.” A sentimental library is characterized by memory and association. It’s the halfway point between alphabetical and aesthetic. And, in my case, each book’s placement corresponds not just to when I read it and how I felt, but to whatever activity takes place beneath it now. They are thus animated in a way they might not be otherwise. Like it or not, I am in constant, real-time conversation with their contents.

The ledge above my desk is home to spirit animals (keeping in mind that selecting an arctic fox as one’s spirit animal does not make one an arctic fox). Here are essay collections by David Sedaris, Joan Didion, Ian Frazier, Jenny Diski and Nora Ephron. Here is fiction by Lorrie Moore, George Saunders and Richard Yates. The books above my sofa relax me on sight, or else they remind me of some pleasant time during which I acquired them. Donna Tartt, John Cheever, Colum McCann, Curtis Sittenfeld, Isaac Babel (listen, some people are relaxed by Isaac Babel). The books above the TV act as a kind of antidote to the TV. Here, full names need not apply. Woolf, Roth, Dostoyevsky, Baldwin, Dickens, Nabokov, Capote. The books in the bedroom I can really be myself around. These are books I don’t mind watching me sleep — a creepy bar met by the likes of Katherine Mansfield, Russell Banks, Edna Ferber, Don DeLillo and Joy Williams.

But perhaps the most meaningfully located are the books perched above the chair where I sit when I can’t write. The emergency chair. It’s an uncomfortable Victorian thing upholstered in anemic pea green. I bought it off an artist and like to delude myself into thinking it has good juju. On the ledge above the chair are galleys — early-bound work distributed for press coverage — by contemporary giants like Haruki Murakami, Zadie Smith and Bret Easton Ellis. Many of them still contain the letters from the publishers stuck inside them. The language is peppered with introductory adjectives, but otherwise it’s pretty swagger-free. It’s more hopeful. It tiptoes around the prospect of greatness in a way that seems comical in retrospect — a reminder that no one was born a sure thing.

Susan Sontag, who arranged her books by literary tradition (e.g. Russian literature) and then chronology, would scoff at my mushy method. So would James Wood, who has written that “in any private library the totality of books is meaningful, while each individual volume is relatively meaningless.” Certainly a lifetime of taste is more illuminating than whatever one read last week. In interviews, the question of “desert island” books is difficult for writers to answer, not because it’s complex but because it’s misrepresentative. I may not have a specific, contextualized association with every title in my possession, but most have had a direct impact. And because of the way they’re positioned, they continue to.

Believe me, it shocks no one more than me, who traffics in sarcasm, that I’m sitting here (literally, under an unlikely canopy of Lydia Millet and Charlie Smith) extolling the virtues of a sentimental library. And as a person who renounces fads — no pastel pyramids for me, thank you — part of me still aspires to a more traditional approach. The alphabet is less work, for one. And it’s comforting to think that, like emotions themselves, books can be corralled by time and order. Put in their place. Intellectualized. Made easier for new people to access. Maybe all I really need is a bigger apartment.

Then again, maybe all I really need I already have. # # #

[Sloane Crosley is the author, most recently, of Look Alive Out There: Essays.(2018). See other books by Crosley here. She also is a regular contributor to GQ, Elle and NPR as well as the Times. Crosley received a BA (English literature and creative writing) from Connecticut College.]

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