The Tools of the Trade

by

Nicki Leone

Last year I invested a fair amount of money and a fair amount of a carpenter friend’s time to help me create the kind of library I had always wanted—one where all the walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling book cases. It took all year, but by the fall I had my library, wall-to-wall bookshelves, and I have spent the better part of the following months shelving and re-shelving, organizing, categorizing, and otherwise fondling my books as I at last was able to put them in the place they were meant to go. I could finally get to all my books.

It was only gradually, as I finished shelving my biographies of scientists (and how deliciously decadent to have an entire shelf dedicated to just biographies of scientists!) that I began to realize something was missing. Every single wall in the room was invisible behind towering bookshelves, barely a blank space left to hang so much as a family photo. But still, something felt off kilter.

It wasn't the space left on the shelves. I knew from long experience that empty space on bookshelves fills itself up without any help from me—an illustration of the truism that nature abhors a vacuum. So I wasn’t concerned about the few leftover gaps. They would soon be gone.

It wasn’t the shelves themselves—my friend’s craftsmanship had been excellent and the shelves stood in a uniform, regimented row, each shelf in alignment, tops even and barely an inch from the ceiling, none of the shelves bending or bowing under the weight of the books they held.

So what was it? What was niggling at the back of my brain, whispering “this still isn’t perfect”? I looked at the books and wondered if I should reorganize them yet again so the more beautiful volumes were at eye level. No, I thought. I had already removed any book from the library not worthy to sit on these new hand-made shelves. Review copies and uncorrected proofs had all been banished to a back room where they sat on shelves as bare and functional as their plain paper covers stamped “Not for Sale.”

Signage, perhaps? I came into my book life as a bookseller—I was used to shelves carrying labels like “Biography” or “Mysteries” or “Self-Help.” And in bookstores most of the shelves sport small hand-written cards under particular books the staff likes and wants to recommend. I had no signs and no cards for my shelves. A casual visitor would not know there was a shelf devoted to biographies of scientists unless they took a bit of trouble to read all the titles in the case. Perhaps I needed some nice engraved brass plates?

But as appealing as this notion is—I rather like the idea of shelves discreetly and elegantly labeled with phrases like “Scientific Biographies” or “Sherlockania” or “Radical Lesbian Feminist Literature” (especially this) in copperplate script—it wasn’t what was missing. I didn’t need the signs, after all. I had put all the books up in the first place, so I knew where everything was. The only one who would benefit from signs would be the dog, who is not a big reader.

I went to sit down and think about what was wrong with my dream room, and suddenly the answer was obvious.

There was no place to sit.

A library, you must understand, is not simply a storage room for books. It is a work room, just as a kitchen is for a cook, or a woodworking shop is for a carpenter. Those books are not there simply to impress visitors with my obvious lack of discipline in a bookstore. They are the tools of my trade—the wrenches and hammers and sometimes the hacksaws of my life as a professional bookseller and book reviewer. So a library can be stuffed to the rafters with books, but that won’t help if there is no place to sit and read them. Nowhere to take them down, lay them out to consult them. My library room was wall-to-wall bookshelves, but otherwise all but empty.

Because I have lead a somewhat transient, low-income life (booksellers are often “paid” in employee discounts on the books they buy with their meager paychecks), I don’t own much in the way of furniture. What I have has mostly been scavenged from friends who were moving, or put together from cheap kits with an Allen wrench and a staple gun. I had one round wood table that used to belong to my bookstore, but no chairs that fit it. I had a couple bar stools that were too high for the table, meaning I had to sit hunched over to work. I had one small cart with folding chairs that could be expanded into a table with a couple of leaves. For several years I had been forcing guests to cram their legs under this thing when they came to dinner. The piece that held up the leaves was perfectly situated to bang your knees when you pulled in your chair. And the chairs were short, uncomfortable folding wooden ones that had the double advantage of not providing back support and cutting into your legs along the edges of the seat.

In other words, I had this wonderful room full of books, and no desire to spend any time there.

It was not a situation that was easily rectified. I didn’t have much free money, and what little there was tended to be spent on books. You know how much a good table or reading chair costs? Now think of all the books you can buy for that kind of money.

Then my mother came to visit for the holidays, bringing with her the latest load of stuff-from-my-grandmother’s-house that had no place to live in her own. Sure, I told mom on the phone, I could use it. Unlike most of my friends, my grandmother had very nice furniture. It was threadbare and worn, but grandma, usually a very frugal woman, was not known to skimp on either clothes or furnishings. She was a tiny woman so her clothes I couldn’t wear. But her furniture I could certainly sit in. Mom brought me down two of her chairs—both of which carried strong childhood memories for me. On was a yellow satin damask armchair with a shell back. It was perfect for curling up in to read. The other was a small mahogany chair that grandma would use sitting at her secretary desk in order to write letters and pay bills. Grandma liked it because it had what she called a rose carved into the back—Rose, being her name, was a common motif among her things. Mom and I have since looked at the carving and decided it actually represents a camellia, but this doesn’t sully my memory.

So now I had a place to sit in the library. But I didn’t have a place to work. So I called she-who-made-the-bookshelves and asked if she could make me a table.

Not just any table. A nice big farmhouse style table long enough to seat a mess of folks for Christmas dinner and wide enough that you’d have to stand and lean over to reach the other side. The kind of table with room for all the books you were referencing, and the ones you were planning on reading, and your computer, and your tea tray with its coffee pot, mug, and bowl of fruit. And maybe a cat.

The plans for such a table were simply an Internet search away, and it wasn’t long before my friend was bringing me wood samples and stain swatches and sending me queries like “do you really want me to whack this thing with a chain to give it the ‘distressed’ look?” (I told her no.) Tables are apparently easier to build than book cases, because I had mine—more than seven feet long and twenty-eight inches wide—in a couple of weeks, the heavy pine planks stained a warm honey-gold. The benches arrived a week after that. We hauled the heavy table in through the double doors, two people on each end, muscles straining as it was navigated around one corner and then another, and then set down with a heavy thump that suggested it would take an earthquake to displace it ever again. And suddenly with the finality of that thump, the library was really a library.

After everyone had left with my effusive thanks ringing in their ears and a couple of loaves of fresh baked bread in their hands as a paltry token of my gratitude, I pulled up my grandmother’s camellia chair to the head of my new table and just sat there, feeling alive with the possibility of what could be done.

I know. First world problems, right? I have spent forty years of my reading life working and reading in less than ideal conditions and I’ve done alright under the circumstances. It’s not like I was going to stop reading or writing if I didn’t have the perfect workplace. So was all this effort worth it? Or was I simply giving in to the same kind of self-indulgence that writers often succumb to when they insist on cleaning the house before they will sit down at their desk to start writing. Am I just one of those people who wants everything to be perfect before she can concentrate and really start working?

Well perhaps there is a little of that going on. I can procrastinate with the best of them and I’ve been known to avoid writing in the most extreme ways in the past. Once, I even found myself cleaning the oven rather than sitting down with my laptop to work. That is some serious avoidance, let me tell you.

Still, the effort to create the perfect library workspace quickly justified itself. Seated on the bench at my new library table, I find myself working for longer periods, no longer distracted by aching muscles from uncomfortable chairs, or interrupted by the need to go find some book I don’t have immediately to hand. I write faster and with better focus sitting at this table than I have ever been able to sitting on the sofa, say, or sitting propped up with pillows in bed. I read more easily and with more attention, finally able to settle into a comfortable chair under a good light. And because my books—my tools of the trade—are all around me in easy reach, I find that I take more time, go into more detail, explore in more depth the things that I am reading, and the things that I am writing.

Because I like to cook, I’ve never questioned the importance of having a really good pan and a really sharp knife. Some writers probably feel the same way about a really good pen or a really sturdy notebook. But as a writer, all I needed, apparently, was a really good place to sit in my room full of books.

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 with the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.