There was a time when my expanding collection was a point of pride. Each time I applied the “Ex Libris” I would beam down at it and think,the collection grows stronger. I would close the cover and hold the book in my hand, taking in its object-ness with great satisfaction, cocking my head in different angles like my wife does when she’s trying on clothes in the mirror. Then I’d open it up and admire the bookplate again, to happily confirm the book was mine from that moment on. Forever,I thought. This book is mine forever. Even after I die, when this book has been left to one of my children, it will still be ‘From the Library of F.T. West.’
“One of my dad’s books...” they’d say, looking down at it in their two hands, in which they could see so much of my hands, these long, slender fingers... “He really loved his books.” It would make them sad to think of me. They would wish I was still alive, but they would find comfort in the fact that they had the books to remind them of me.
The reality of it now is that neither of my children can stand having any extra books around at all---especially not any of mine---because I ruined it for them by having way too many. They don’t hate reading, thank God, but just the actual books and the acquisition thereof. I used to find it painfully ironic when they borrowed from the public library downtown just to avoid having to deal with me and my Home Library, as I called it then. They checked out titles they knew I would have. Books of which I had multiple editions. Books that everybody has, like ‘Siddhartha’ and ‘1984’. It was what they had to rebel against to stake their claim as my children, as if they were stiff-arming a new step-sibling they didn’t want added to the family.
“Why??” I would whine.
“Because if I asked you for it, it would take like a year to find it.”
“How many times have I told you?! I have a system! Name a title, I’ll find it right now.”
To this they always rolled their eyes and said, “Not again, Dad” which was a reference to an infamous family incident that involved us missing a plane to Italy because I wouldn’t give up looking for ‘The Razor’s Edge’, by Somerset Maugham. My wife had asked me for the book six days earlier because she wanted to read it on the trip and from that point I’d spent almost every free hour I had scouring the house. The three nights before we were supposed to leave I barely slept and even canceled my classes one day to stay home and search. It was a low point, one of the earlier signs the library was becoming a problem. My family used it against me and my books whenever the opportunity presented itself.
“That was a fluke!” I’d cry.
It’s true there was a system---at least initially---but it was also true that as the collection began turning the corner from reasonable to unreasonable the system began failing me more and more frequently. Keeping a growing library in order is difficult when your space is limited. When you have to add a book to a shelf that’s already full you have two choices:
A. Put it where it belongs---moving the last book of each row down to the first position in the next row and so on until you have effectively moved every book in the shelf (after the one you’re placing) forward one space. Then, of course, you’re still left with one unplaced book which must be moved to the next shelf of that particular section, i.e. Biography, subcategory, Autobiography. Now, if that shelf is also full, you repeat the process for that shelf and any full shelves that follow until you’ve reached the end---a free space in a shelf that allows for the expansion. (I used to do this, like back in the 80’s before things got out of control and I was still in love with every single book. But then at some point it just became absurd to go through what amounted to hours of work almost every time I made a new acquisition, so I started to opt for the second choice).
B. Create annexes. For me, annexes worked like a combination of endnotes and appendices---I would place an index card where the book was supposed to go, typed with the title and author on the end so if I left the card sticking out an inch you could see the info. If you pulled the card out a little more you could see in which annex that title had been placed.
At first it was great. I stopped parking my car in my half of the garage, brought in a dehumidifier and hung some plastic sheeting to help protect against mildew, then built some shelves and dedicated the place solely to annexes. I felt like a new collector all over again. It was so effortless to place new acquisitions! It was as if a trade embargo had been lifted. Plus, since I also had a smallish typewriter collection which included a rare, burgundy, 1935 Remington 3B that had all of its original parts and was still typing like a dream, the annexes gave me cause to use that gorgeous machine to write the index cards. God knows, I wasn’t doing much else in the way of writing back then.
Of course, like everything, the excitement of the new space faded when those annexes filled up---which they did rather quickly given my newfound freedom to acquire without concern for space. Then I asked my wife if I could use her half of the garage for the annexes to the annexes. I caught her on the tail-end of a bad day, but she would have said no anyway.
“Just stop, Fred,” she said, like it was the simplest thing.
“Please don’t call me Fred.” She knows I don’t like to be called Fred. It was a cheap, underhanded way to address the issue.
“You have more than enough books.” Again, like it was that easy. Like she was my mother and could just end it there with a stern, Enough is enough. Like she didn’t know me at all.
“I can’t just stop. It doesn’t work like that.”
She looked at me then with an expression that seemed to be fury, exhaustion, and pity all at once. “What if it’s me or the books? What if I can’t take it anymore?”
It really ticked me off she would say that---especially back then when it wasn’t even that bad. It was cruel of her to hold something like that over my head. Of course I’d choose her. But why should I have to choose?
“Jesus Christ, Claire!” I yelled, “Ask me to build a fucking shed out back before you pull that shit on me!” Then I walked out the open garage door, down the driveway and out into the road, where I turned around and shouted, “You want to give up our marriage for THAT?!”
I hadn’t realized until just then that both of our kids, 7 and 10 at the time, were on the front lawn. Jay stood with a yellow Whiffle bat resting on his shoulder. His feet pointed away but his torso was twisted around, his eyes staring at me with confusion. Mandy was a pitcher’s distance away, arms limp to her sides, also staring. The ball was in the grass just beyond Jay. Strike one, I thought, in poor taste.
“Who are you talking to, Dad?” said Mandy.
I looked at them both for what seemed like awhile before my wife, their mother, walked out from the garage.
“Sorry, kids,” she said in a sad voice. “I said something to Dad I didn’t mean.”
The argument wasn’t really over right then, but we did get past it in due time, and I did build a shed out back, and about four years later when the shed was full I again propositioned my wife about her half of the garage, but this time with a trade offer that included a carport in the driveway and the promise of clearing all but one bookshelf out of our bedroom. And surprisingly, she accepted.
“I can’t sleep soundly at night because in the back of my mind I’m always afraid of being crushed to death by books!” she’d once said to me in bed.
“Come on,” I said with mock seriousness, “You could always read your way out.”
She giggled on my shoulder then groaned into my arm as she bit it playfully, but hard enough.
“I mean it, F.T.” she said lightly. Her hand lay on my chest. “This should be our sanctuary.”
I had a vision then of an earthquake---my books pouring down on my Claire as she slept. I moved my hand up to meet hers, and just held it there on my rising and falling chest.
We live in the Bay Area, where the San Andreas Fault is always threatening. We were lucky in 1989---the epicenter was on the other side of the bay and the only book that dropped in our house was the one I was holding when the first tremor hit. It was, ‘Where I’m Calling From’, the collection of Raymond Carver stories, which was brand new in paperback and I had just purchased that day. I was standing in front of the New Acquisitions section in the living room, admiring the book for a few moments before placing it in the position of prominence that all brand new acquisitions enjoyed until the next came along---first book on the top shelf. When the shaking began my instinct was to drop the Carver and throw my weight against the full bookcase, I guess to stop the whole thing from coming down. Anyway, they kept saying another big one was coming.
I would have cleared the books from our bedroom that very night, because I love my wife, but I just didn’t have anywhere to move them to. I didn’t mind moving my books around because for me it was like rearranging furniture is for some people---the changed location made them seem somehow renewed. I’d see them differently. Logistically though, it could be a bit of a nightmare, so not only did I need to be in the right frame of mind to tackle a move head-on, but also to be sure there was enough space. Otherwise the whole thing could fall apart mid-operation and never get properly finished. And there were few things more crippling to my system than an incomplete move. In fact, the Somerset Maugham incident was a direct product of a botched transfer of the Ng--Mo Fiction section from the den to the basement. The move was initiated in 1991 and the Maugham incident was in 1996. It was my daughter, Mandy who finally found ‘The Razor’s Edge’---in a cardboard box that had been caught in limbo between the den and the basement, under the bottom shelf of the pantry---in 2002.
Believe it or not, in my mad search for that book in the days leading up to our Italian vacation, I actually looked in the pantry. Hell, I looked everywhere. But that box, it was labeled of all things, “PANTRY STUFF.” Needless to say, that’s why I didn’t open it to look for Somerset Maugham. If only the box labeled, “PANTRY STUFF” had been in the linen closet, or under the basement stairs! A red flag would’ve gone up---this does not belong here, it could be books---and I would’ve opened the goddamn box!
We still made it to Italy, just a day later than intended. When I finally snapped out of the possessed trance I had worked myself into, I felt terrible guilt and bought us all new tickets even though I really couldn’t afford it. I just put it on the credit card. I was deeply ashamed to have let my family see me come so unhinged. I imagine now how unnerving it must have been for my teenaged kids.
“Dad! What the hell are you doing?! We have to go RIGHT NOW! GIVE IT UP!” Jay yelled.
“I’m just looking one last time under the sink...”
“UNDER THE SINK, DAD?! NONE OF US CARE IF YOU HAVE THE FUCKING BOOK OR NOT! WE HAVE TO GO!”
“Watch your language, you’re still in my house...”
“Yeah, I KNOW! I’M PAINFULLY AWARE OF THAT FACT! DO YOU REALIZE WE’RE GOING TO MISS THE PLANE IF YOU DON’T GET UP OFF THE FLOOR AND GET IN THE CAR RIGHT NOW?!”
“I DON’T CARE! GO! LEAVE WITHOUT ME! I’M NOT COMING!”
And actually they did leave without me. But I had stalled them long enough already that they ended up missing the flight anyway. Which made it that much worse. They went all the way to the airport and back, an hour and a half each way in traffic, stressed and fuming mad while I sat at home still looking under the sink, in the couch cushions, up my ass, who knows---it was all a blur after they left. I knew then, when I heard the garage door close behind them, the severity of what I had done. And even though I maintained my own disgusted anger for the first hour, by the time they returned I had melted into a sad, pathetic, messy pool of regret. They walked right through me, slicing with steely dispositions, my wife and two kids, rolling their packed suitcases behind them. Only when I could prove that I had the new tickets would they even begin to listen to my long, self-flagellating apology.
Mandy was looking for cake decorating supplies when she found ‘The Razor’s Edge’ six years later in the box in the pantry. She was baking my favorite, yellow with chocolate icing, for my 50th birthday. She wrapped up the book as a present and wrote on the card, Happy Birthday, You Crazy Bear! I believe you’ve been looking for this... Next to a filled-in drawing of a heart, like she always does, she signed her name. On the cake, in thin pipes of white icing was written, We love you!
Despite her inherent benevolence, back in Mandy’s teen years she still had the capacity for that special brand of flagrant tantrum that sticks in a parent’s memory. Claire and I had talks about these outbursts lying in bed with the lights off---where most of our best talks happened. We would look up toward the ceiling at a colorful mobile of paper cranes that Mandy had made for us only a few innocent years earlier. The light from the front porch, which we always left on, was enough to illuminate this gift as it lilted in the air of our bedroom.
“Do we punish her or just let her be?”, I asked.
“What about comforting her, F.T.?” said Claire.
Silence. Then Claire spoke again.
“I think she might need more attention.”
“Maybe.”
I was still hurt by what she had done this time. She’d gone through the entire house and pushed in every single one of the annex index cards, so they could no longer be seen. It was a serious slap in my face. She knew how important my books were to me and she knew that the system---and I---would be devastated by such an anarchist measure, and she did it for exactly those reasons. Even to pull the cards out would have been less of an affront because I could’ve placed them back in as they were. But she knew this too and made a point to do the worst she could. Pushed in, between the books, I couldn’t even begin to detect where the cards were. The amount of maddening work it would take to recover them would be immense.
I never did fully restore the system after that, and the state of the collection really started rolling downhill from there---like a big, beautiful snowball coming down from the mountain, then passing below the snow-line into the sticks and dirt and dead pine needles and gathering all that stuff that looks like crap when its sticking to the once-pure snowball, and going and going until it’s not a snowball at all anymore but just a pile of mud at the bottom of a mountain. But I don’t blame Mandy for any of that. I don’t even remember what typical fatherly imposition of mine she and I were arguing over that day, and I don’t think she would either. It doesn’t matter because in the end it was obvious what it was about.
First, books began accumulating in places other than shelves. Like on tables and counters and desks, mostly just surfaces that would be considered relatively normal places for books to be. Then, when those piles reached unreasonable heights---the point on the graph where the Precariousness line intersects with the Family Safety line---the books started to show up in places that were not so normal. Under the armchairs in the den, stacked along the kitchen floor, and up the steps, lining the sides of the stairwells. The stacks themselves turned into furniture, on which rested all kinds of things, like lamps and sculptures and bowls of fruit. In the dining room one could actually be thankful for all the extra surfaces within reaching distance of the table to keep the salad bowl or a bottle of wine during a meal.
It’s arguable that during this phase things were still remotely under control. My family chided me constantly, sometimes with serious anger, sometimes with humor, depending on how much love they felt for me in that moment. But there was still a certain sanity to it all. The books created a uniform coziness throughout the house that made me feel like I did when I was a boy and would build up a fort of couch cushions around me to protect from playmate intruders and flying projectiles. I think even my family could relate to that safe, padded feeling on some level, especially during the winter when it was cold and gray and drizzly outside. Nobody really considered the books as potential reading material anymore. Hardly even I did. They became these colorful bricks that held our house together, a consistent motif that linked all the rooms. For about three good years the collection stayed on the right side of the line between Acceptably Quirky and Oppressive. But of course at some point it crossed sides. Or, I crossed sides. Though I’m not sure how much power I had over any of it then.
Books ended up in the worst places. Confoundingly bad places for books to be. Next to the bathtub. On the stove. In front of doors that needed to be opened regularly. On the driver’s-side floor of my car, under my feet. I don’t know how it happened but there was no turning back. When any one of my family members tried to move a stack of books out of one of these absurd places I would grab them by the arm with wild eyes.
“What are you doing?!” I rabidly asked my son once.
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m moving these goddamn things. You can’t stack books on my bed, Dad. It’s my BED, get it? I sleep there.”
“But, Jay! Just tell me if you want me to move them and I’ll do it myself, so I can keep some organization!”
“Organization, Dad? Are you kidding me? I don’t even know what to say to that.”
I think by then none of my family knew what to say. Shortly after that stage, close to the end of it all, the outright anger and teasing stopped and they began to walk around the glaring issue as if it were a mental illness. And in a way, that’s exactly what it was.
It was in college that my real love for books was born. Reading had been an alright pastime in the high school days---occasionally I’d get inspired by some required text for a class or a novel I’d read on vacation---but by the winter of my sophomore year at Colgate the whole paradigm had shifted completely and reading had become the center of my world. All of a sudden I was awestruck by the limitless possibilities of an education based on my own choices. The library, to me, represented the heart of the institution and I spent as much time there as I could. Sometimes on weekend nights I would claim to my friends that I couldn’t go out because I had a paper to write, but in fact, I would smoke a joint in my dorm room and then walk across the quad to the library where I would spend at least an hour wandering through the hushed stacks, looking at, feeling, smelling, the books---all my senses pulsating with pleasure. The mission would be to choose a handful of particularly compelling tomes and return to my room, where I would smoke another joint and spend the rest of my night reading and eating snacks my father had mailed to me in care packages. He would also send me books in those packages and that was how my personal collection began.
From an early age I’d had a strong affinity for categorization---sorting my baseball cards by sets, or making weekly lists of my top-five favorite comic-book super heroes. Naturally, when the time came, books received the same treatment. In the summer before my Junior year it occurred to me that I when I returned to school in September I should establish a comprehensive enumerated index of the contents of, not only my own book collection, but also those of my friends. That way, if anyone in our group were looking for a particular title they could come to me, like I was a card catalog, and find out who they could borrow it from. In practice, it was a resource that hardly anyone ever used besides me, but somehow it was just something I wanted to to. Back then, when reading meant everything to me, those humble collections of my friends seemed to amplify my awareness of how the world was an endless library, full of experiences to be had and archived.
Over the course of my journey from then until 1996, the meaning of all that idealization had become garbled to the point of unintelligibility. The masses of my books fossilized into nothing more than an unbearable deadweight, pulling my home into the ground, and all the while I just kept blindly heaving more onto the piles. In rare moments of crushing clarity I could see that the only chance at salvation would be a complete purification, a sweeping and irreversible Act of God.
Me standing on numb legs in the street, watching the firemen try in vain to save my house, my books, from the flames... It was the arsonist who changed my life. Our lives.
Claire and the kids were in Florida visiting her parents, so they missed the show. Before the blaze took over I ran through the house with suitcases, boxes, and bags, collecting all the things that truly mattered. Photo albums, diplomas, artwork done by our friends, the kids’ school projects we’d saved, Jay’s Pentax camera that was mine before it was his, Mandy’s “Treasure Chest,” Claire’s wedding dress and the quilt from her grandmother, the framed picture of my mother that my father gave to me...
I stood amongst it all, laid around me on the street, with Mandy’s paper-crane mobile dangling from my hand---these long, slender fingers. My chest heaved, gulping down the cold, clean air of February. A neighbor appeared near my arm and began to ask questions I wasn’t even hearing. Probably she wanted to know how it’d started. How did it all start? All I can remember saying is, “This air tastes magnificent.”
The only thing I didn’t save from the fire that I really miss now, more than ten years later, is that burgundy Remington 3B. That baby had beautiful action. For awhile I was looking for one like it but a couple years back Claire put the search to rest when she gave me a sturdy and handsome Smith-Corona for my 60th birthday. As I pulled away the wrapping paper she imitated the seasoned voice of the man who had sold it to her---“If you take good care of this one you shouldn’t ever have to buy another.” Seeing as I use it every day now and I’ve grown accustomed to it, I hope the promise to be true.
