(Note: I wrote the piece below in September, shortly before my move from Asheville, North Carolina, to Front Royal, Virginia).
There they are, eight hundred books or more, many of them standing on eleven shelves in the living room and two bedrooms, some of them stacked on the floor, a couple hundred packed in low containers with their spines facing the viewer. The books on the shelves, particularly those in the essay and fiction sections, look like soldiers assembled for roll call after a horrendous battle, their ranks breached by casualties, gaps left by a thousand of their comrades who now lie in boxes ready to be moved to a new home.
There they are, eight hundred books or more, many of them standing on eleven shelves in the living room and two bedrooms, some of them stacked on the floor, a couple hundred packed in low containers with their spines facing the viewer. The books on the shelves, particularly those in the essay and fiction sections, look like soldiers assembled for roll call after a horrendous battle, their ranks breached by casualties, gaps left by a thousand of their comrades who now lie in boxes ready to be moved to a new home.
This simile, I see now, is misleading, for the books on the shelves are not the survivors but the casualties. They are the ones destined for new homes when I move later this month, poor abandoned volumes to be examined and purchased by the owner of a local used bookstore, with the remaining orphans bundled off to our local Goodwill store.
Some of these forsaken books are only casual acquaintances. Art: A New History by Paul Johnson, whose other books have brought me much pleasure, I have scarcely opened since its purchase five years ago. Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Margaret Visser’s The Rituals of Dinner, and Flannery O’Conner’s The Habit of Being: these and perhaps a score more of their companions have occupied shelf space for ages without their pages catching a whiff of fresh air.
Then there are the twenty-four volumes from the Folio Society. Tall and proud in their slip-cases, these handsome books run a gamut of subjects, from the poems of G.K. Chesterton to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, from Conrad’s Lord Jim to the Discourses of Epictetus. Perhaps it is the heavy case enfolding each of these works, perhaps the fine paper, ink, and binding with which they are constructed, but from my regard these books disinvite reading. They seem more decoration than book, present on my shelves more as affectation than for the pleasure given by some grimy paperback. Opening one of these “fine editions” makes me feel I should be sitting in some monastic library of the thirteenth century, reverently and slowly turning the pages.
Other books, however immense my affection for them, will bite the dust because they can easily be gotten in a library. The town to which I am moving—Front Royal, Virginia—has a fine new public library whose shelves doubtless contain novels like Pat Conroy’s Beach Music, Anne Tyler’s Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant, and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove; biographies of Fitzgerald and Hemingway; histories like Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and Baker’s Human Smoke. In addition, Front Royal is home to Christendom College, a Catholic institution of higher learning in possession of a large collection of books on faith and theology, thereby allowing me to abandon my two hundred or so volumes of Catholic fiction, theology, and history.
Finally, I am shedding books that at the time of my reading had an enormous impact on my heart and mind, and on my writing, but which I have not recently opened again. These are the true friends of my collection whom I am leaving for dead. Here are the Kenneth Roberts’ tales of colonial and Revolutionary War America; Susan Howatch’s fictional saga of the Anglican church in the twentieth century (Why has no one made a mini-series of these finely wrought stories?); Raymond Chandler’s detective novels; Evelyn Waugh’s Men At Arms and some of his early novels; biographies of John Gardner, John Kennedy Toole, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a dozen others. Other victims of this triage include books of essays and social criticism by writers like Christopher Lasch, Annie Dillard, and Mike Royko, and various collections of poetry I have accumulated over the past forty years. To all these old comrades I offer a sad but necessary farewell, hoping they will charm and educate other readers as they did me.
Originally, I had steeled myself to sell off all but a hundred books, knowing full well I would also be selling off an enormous piece of my heart. It wasn’t for the money—I confess I am temporarily broke, but no one pays much for books nowadays—and it wasn’t for lack of affection. No—the circumstances of my leave-taking and my concomitant mood of despondency had broken my will to pack up dozens more boxes and carry them onto a truck.
Then came an intervention. First my daughter and then a friend, who is my physician as well, urged me to reconsider my decision, reminding me that these books were monuments from my past and might serve as a bedrock for my uncertain future. These two people made me see that whatever my emotions of the moment, however distressing my situation, a time would come when the sun would once again shine in my life. If I gave up all but a few of my books, they reasoned, my impetuous sacrifice might dim the light of that sun.
As a result of their advice, I have now spent the week haunting grocery stores, collecting those cartons that seem as especially constructed for transporting books as they are for milk. The books most vital to me—nine hundred, a thousand—are now nearly packed. They sit in their brown boxes in various corners of my apartment, awaiting, as am I, the next step of my adventure, a step my books and I will now take together.
Some of these forsaken books are only casual acquaintances. Art: A New History by Paul Johnson, whose other books have brought me much pleasure, I have scarcely opened since its purchase five years ago. Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Margaret Visser’s The Rituals of Dinner, and Flannery O’Conner’s The Habit of Being: these and perhaps a score more of their companions have occupied shelf space for ages without their pages catching a whiff of fresh air.
Then there are the twenty-four volumes from the Folio Society. Tall and proud in their slip-cases, these handsome books run a gamut of subjects, from the poems of G.K. Chesterton to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, from Conrad’s Lord Jim to the Discourses of Epictetus. Perhaps it is the heavy case enfolding each of these works, perhaps the fine paper, ink, and binding with which they are constructed, but from my regard these books disinvite reading. They seem more decoration than book, present on my shelves more as affectation than for the pleasure given by some grimy paperback. Opening one of these “fine editions” makes me feel I should be sitting in some monastic library of the thirteenth century, reverently and slowly turning the pages.
Other books, however immense my affection for them, will bite the dust because they can easily be gotten in a library. The town to which I am moving—Front Royal, Virginia—has a fine new public library whose shelves doubtless contain novels like Pat Conroy’s Beach Music, Anne Tyler’s Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant, and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove; biographies of Fitzgerald and Hemingway; histories like Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and Baker’s Human Smoke. In addition, Front Royal is home to Christendom College, a Catholic institution of higher learning in possession of a large collection of books on faith and theology, thereby allowing me to abandon my two hundred or so volumes of Catholic fiction, theology, and history.
Finally, I am shedding books that at the time of my reading had an enormous impact on my heart and mind, and on my writing, but which I have not recently opened again. These are the true friends of my collection whom I am leaving for dead. Here are the Kenneth Roberts’ tales of colonial and Revolutionary War America; Susan Howatch’s fictional saga of the Anglican church in the twentieth century (Why has no one made a mini-series of these finely wrought stories?); Raymond Chandler’s detective novels; Evelyn Waugh’s Men At Arms and some of his early novels; biographies of John Gardner, John Kennedy Toole, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a dozen others. Other victims of this triage include books of essays and social criticism by writers like Christopher Lasch, Annie Dillard, and Mike Royko, and various collections of poetry I have accumulated over the past forty years. To all these old comrades I offer a sad but necessary farewell, hoping they will charm and educate other readers as they did me.
Originally, I had steeled myself to sell off all but a hundred books, knowing full well I would also be selling off an enormous piece of my heart. It wasn’t for the money—I confess I am temporarily broke, but no one pays much for books nowadays—and it wasn’t for lack of affection. No—the circumstances of my leave-taking and my concomitant mood of despondency had broken my will to pack up dozens more boxes and carry them onto a truck.
Then came an intervention. First my daughter and then a friend, who is my physician as well, urged me to reconsider my decision, reminding me that these books were monuments from my past and might serve as a bedrock for my uncertain future. These two people made me see that whatever my emotions of the moment, however distressing my situation, a time would come when the sun would once again shine in my life. If I gave up all but a few of my books, they reasoned, my impetuous sacrifice might dim the light of that sun.
As a result of their advice, I have now spent the week haunting grocery stores, collecting those cartons that seem as especially constructed for transporting books as they are for milk. The books most vital to me—nine hundred, a thousand—are now nearly packed. They sit in their brown boxes in various corners of my apartment, awaiting, as am I, the next step of my adventure, a step my books and I will now take together.