…As too many books.

There is however, such a thing as not enough bookshelves.

When Blondie and I PCSed out of Spain over fifteen years ago, the packing crew had a pool going on how many boxes of books they would eventually pack. The grand total topped out at 64 boxes at that point. Since we returned to the land of the Big PX, replete with establishments such as Half-Price Books, the sales tables at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and various library and book-club events, the increase on the 1991 book census has been geometric. At a certain point, accommodating all the books in free-standing bookcases would have reduced the house to a kind of solidly-packed, book-lined burrow, dark and fusty, with barely enough space for a reading light, and a stove.

Beginning bout five years ago, I took the situation in hand, and began buying lengths of shelving and brackets of the ornamental sort— for the ends that showed— and utility brackets for the interior of the shelves which wouldn’t show when properly packed full of books. The first efforts at securing order among the books involved a narrow stretch of wall where the kitchen merged into the dining area, to one side of a large window looking out into the back yard. Three small white-painted shelves advanced up the wall towards the ceiling, for the cookbooks that I used most frequently, and the jar of pencils and notepads best kept close to the telephone. The rag-tag collection of shelves that had served us until then were banished to the garage. Most of them were heavy, ugly dark-wood things that took up a lot of space, bought at the PX because I had an urgent need for storage at the moment, and they were cheap. A couple of weekends later, another set of shelves went up on the other side of the window, for the not-so often used cookbooks, and the gardening and home-improvement porn. I put up a long shelf over the window for the blue-flowering Danish china, and there was that whole end of the house rendered light, and bright, and all the books in order. So, I looked around and said, hmmmm.

The wall opposite the big window was next. This had a double-doorway from the living room into a little room that we used as a TV den, more or less in the center. Four-foot-long shelves went up on either side, all the way to the top of the door… and then five more shelves above those which ran the width of the wall, but shortened to follow the angle of the ceiling. I need a very tall ladder to get to the top three shelves… in fact; the stuff that I never use is all parked up there. Everything was ordered by subject or genre, and a couple of nice vases and knick-knacks interspersed between the books. Last of all, I fitted six shelves on either side of the fireplace, and all but one of the old bookcases were banished to the garage. Now the living room was lined with books on three walls, and all the space between freed up. The three wooden shelves I kept in the house still, were squeezed into the TV den, as they were oak and matched the stereo/media center.

The only place where chaos, clutter and disorganization still reigned was among the oldest collection of books… the paperbacks, banished to a set of tall walnut-veneer bookcases in the hallway, and shelved two ranks deep. I had made a stab at alphabetizing them by author, but locating a particular book was a particularly frustrating crap-shoot. But this last weekend, Blondie had prevailed upon me… since she had a shelf of her own books, overflowing in a most untidy way… to bring order, discipline and installed shelves to that last holdout.

We took ourselves away to Home Depot for brackets and five lengths of 5-inch wide shelving, and ran a series of shelves from the end of the hall to the washer and dryer closet. We’ll need to put in another three shelves, actually, but at least everything is now only single-deep. Heck, I can now find stuff that I didn’t lay eyes on since the last time I unpacked it.

Hey, I knew I had a copy of “That Darn Cat”… Granny Jessie took us to see that movie, and my copy was a tie-in, bought at Vromans for 35 cents! And I do have all of Dorothy Dunnets’ Francis Lymond books… read the first of them when I was sick with the flu in a youth hostel in Lincoln. And there was the episode guide to “Blakes’ 7”, and every damn one of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Darkover” books. Wow, that’s kind of an embarrassment. So is the R.F. Delafield “The Dreaming Suburb”. Not too many Agatha Christie mysteries, though. They always seemed a little formulaic to me; I preferred Josephine Tey. And one of the most uproarious novels about the Restoration ever written, John Dickson Carr’s “Most Secret”… So what if they are all stacked sideways on the shelf? At least they are not all hiding behind each other! In not a few cases, I despaired of finding a book that I thought I had, and bought another copy. (Half-Price Books buy-back desk, here we come!)
At least now, we can find what we are looking for. And the hallway seems a great deal wider, too.