Rooms Full of Books

by

Nicki Leone

When I received the news that the house I rent and had been living in for the last fifteen years had been sold to developers, I was publicly dismayed and secretly relieved.  Fifteen years is a long time to stay in one (very beautiful) place, but I had known for awhile that we had outgrown the tiny house. Or rather, that my ever-expanding library had outgrown the house.

I have spent the last twenty years of my life as a bookseller. Not surprisingly, I tend to accumulate books. Eight thousand books to date. Finally, last winter, when the weight of the shelves caused the floor to sink about two inches below the wall, I reluctantly acknowledged the end was near. Though I temporarily remedied the situation by moving all the books to the other side of the room, I knew that was a short-term solution.

There is a definite “clean slate” feeling to moving to a new place –the idea that you can start anew and redo your life completely. Correctly. Get them organized. Get them dusted. What I thought, as I stood facing my book cases with cardboard boxes, packing tape and dust cloth in hand, was “This is your chance to get your books in order.”

I decided on a methodical approach. First, I would weed them out, then clean them, sort them into categories and pack them carefully by subject. My inner librarian (a frustrated little soul) was doing a little happy dance in the anticipation of all that alphabetizing.

This turned out to be completely wrong.

My good intentions lasted about half-way through the first shelf of the first book case. The moment I took out the top row of books and found a second row, hitherto buried, inaccessible and frankly, forgotten, behind them, I knew was sunk. There, behind that first row—novels, mostly, that I had been reading over the last year—was a collection of poetry by Sharon Olds and Amy Clampitt, all of them looking well read and quite dusty. “My god,” I thought “my Sharon Olds binge was at least four years ago.”  I started to peer behind other rows of books, and sure enough hidden behind and beneath every one was evidence of earlier infatuations and interests.

I realized with a jolt that my books were in order after all—they were basically in order of acquisition—the most recently read ones stacked most closely to the surface, earlier ones buried further in the stacks. It was a stunning revelation to realize that those shelves held my entire intellectual life laid bare for anyone curious enough to look: my Edna St. Vincent Millay phase, my (thankfully brief) obsession with fractals, my apparent inability to resist pastiches featuring Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t need a librarian; I needed an archaeologist.

From that moment on, packing went much more slowly, and became much more fun. I allowed myself the time to page through the books as I took them down. It was like looking through a rarified and specialized photo album. And I knew I could no more “weed out” the shelves than I could excise the memories that flooded me as I ran my fingers along their dusty spines. (Have I mentioned that I never dust?)  I abandoned the idea of trying to “organize” the books and let them instead be boxed with their neighbors—with whom they had at least this in common: they had all managed to catch my interest at the same point some time in my checkered life.

It may be that after I move fifty boxes of books from one house to another, I’ll feel differently and be inclined to impose an arbitrary order to the collection.  But at least for now, I’ve decided to leave them as I find them, and let them take me back, shelf by shelf, into an earlier era and an earlier me. I was gratified to find that I still recognized that younger woman, that her favorite books were still my own, and still for the same reasons. Perhaps when I do my unpacking, I’ll put things back in reverse—so that the oldest, most beloved books will come most easily to hand.

It’s a brand new house, after all, and it might be a comfort to have those books visible to remind me that a new house doesn’t mean a whole new person. Luckily, this house has a very strong foundation. The walls are brick and the floor is solid. I am relieved to know it can handle another fifteen years of accumulated reading and living without the bottom dropping out.

I’ve always loved rooms full of books. When I was a little girl, I once famously wrote for one of those “what do you want to be when you grow up?” homework assignments that I wanted to be the “crazy old woman in the scary house at the end of the street with rooms full of books and a hundred cats.” I’m happy and content in libraries and bookstores in a way I never feel in restaurants, bars or even living rooms. Even in the dingiest and darkest little used bookstore—the kind where the narrow aisles disappear into caverns between looming floor-to-ceiling shelves, where the dust gives evidence that no one has even looked at the books on the topmost shelves for years, where one must navigate not only the narrow passageways, but also the many piles of books stacked along the floor—even these are places of excitement, joy and sometimes peace.

In fact, I am so used to having at least some books in every room that I am incapable to walking into any space without immediately, almost unconsciously, assessing it for its book-holding potential. I look for bookcases and shelves, mentally rearranging the furniture to make room for more shelf space,  cataloging which things ought to be sacrificed (usually televisions and decorative end tables) in favor of more shelves. I eye flat surfaces and wonder how much weight they will bear in stacked books. I often spend my time in restaurants imagining how I would turn the place into a bookstore.

Shelf after shelf lined full of books is, well, a beautiful sight to me. Beautiful not just because the books themselves are beautiful because they have pretty jackets or stamped gold type. Beautiful because of what they promise—all the stories, adventures, mystery and wisdom hinted at by their tantalizing titles; Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; The Demon Lover;  An Embarrassment of Riches;  Weavers, Merchants and Kings;  Bitter Lemons;  Dream of Scipio; Glass, Irony and God . . . and these are just a few I can see on my shelves from where I’m sitting. Rooms full of books are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. Every volume is really a window or a door to another kind of life. Standing in the middle of a room that is wall-to-wall books is standing at a way station with roads leading off into any direction you might want to go.

But despite this, well, obsession of mine to fill every available space with books, I’ve actually rarely spent much time on my own personal library. This is mostly because I have worked in bookstores most of my life, so it isn’t like I ever had a lot of extra money for shelves. Whatever money I did have was always spent on the books, not the shelves needed to hold them. ( I garden this way as well. I tend to buy plants, and then worry about where they will go in the yard.) I’ve also lived most of my life in little dive apartments and run-down houses, which to be frank probably wouldn’t have borne the weight of a good bookcase, even if I could have afforded one. In my last house the weight of the books actually had begun to collapse the floor. So my books have lived in piles that leaned against free walls, crammed two-deep onto press-board shelves that bowed under the weight, in milk crates that cracked and collected cobwebs, and in banged-up cardboard boxes that were hauled from apartment to apartment.

If anyone had asked, I would have described my “dream library” as one of those rooms with floor to ceiling cases and a  ladder that rolled around the room on an iron rail. If I was feeling extravagant, maybe even a balcony along the second level. But that dream was as untouchable and unattainable as the descriptions of dream libraries in my favorite (unshelved) novels:

“The man called Isaac nodded and invited us in. A blue-tinged gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall, a virtual basilica of shadows spiralling up under a high glass dome, its dimness pierced by shafts of light that stabbed from above. A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels, steps, platforms, and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled at me and winked.

“Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.”

“Mr. Honeyfoot and Mr. Segundus, being magicians themselves, had not needed to be told that the library of Hurtfew Abbey was dearer to its possessor than all his other riches; and they were not surprized to discover that Mr. Norrell had constructed a beautiful jewel box to house his heart’s treasure. The bookcases which lined the wall of the room were built of English woods and resembled Gothic arches laden with carvings. There were carvings of leaves (dried and twisted leaves, as if the season the artist had intended to represent were autumn), carvings of intertwining rots and branches, carvings of berries and ivy – all wonderfully done. But the wonder of the bookcases was nothing to the wonder of the books.”

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Still, these are but fantasies. Or they were, until something happened that changed my life and the life of my dusty, battered library; I lost my job.

Two years ago the bookstore I had managed for nearly fifteen years finally bowed to market forces and closed. And while this was a very sad thing, one result was that I was able to buy some of the fixtures—the bookcases—very cheap during the closing sale. I found another job, we moved to a bigger house, and suddenly I found myself not only in the possession of actual bookcases, but of a house with enough room for them.  From the moment we did our walk-through, I had picked out the front room of the house (with the best view and the most light) to be “the library.” The space would have been wasted as a living room or parlor. I’ve spent the better part of the last year unpacking all my books, sorting them by subject, putting up bookcases, and basically creating what is, if not exactly the Bodleian, is at least something close to a real personal library, where I can spend my days reading (curled up on the couch) or writing (seated at a round wooden table in one corner) surrounded by all my lovely, lovely books.

This month I put in the last bookcase, so the library is as finished as it is ever likely to be. I’ll admit, I feel a little bit like gloating about it. It is still in a state of some flux—this is a “working” library as much as it is a showcase so there are still piles on the the floor. I decided not to worry about first editions, signed copies or special printings (although I’ve accumulated some of these), because the one thing I wanted people to realize when they looked at the room was that these books were read. Used. Loved.

The room is more organized than it is neat.  Books are shelved basically by subjects that make sense to me; I allowed myself an entire shelf for Shakespeariana and one for Sherlock Holmes—what an indulgence that feels like! And they are as likely to be taken down to be consulted, read, or re-read as they are to be shelved or alphabetized. Of course I’m always acquiring more books. I’ve resisted the temptation to shelve them two or three layers deep because I want to be able to see what I have, but this has sometimes caused a kind of domino effect in rearranging as I tried to make room for something new.

To turn my “room full of books” into a living, breathing place, I added a couch long enough for a six foot person to stretch out on, a few rickety wicker chairs that the cats enjoy immensely, a chess set and a drum kit. I also put up the few drawings I’ve sketched of various pets, and a few of my grandmother’s pictures. I took out two bowls and one goblet made by artist-friends and put them on top of some of the book piles. I dusted off an old sea turtle skull I’m not supposed to have and sat it to overlook the books about mythology. And when I stepped back,  and suddenly there it all was—my “dream library.” With cats. I think I’ve finally grown up.

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.