It’s a Conspiracy

by

Elizabeth Creith

Is there a reader anywhere who has enough shelf space?

I thought not.

I don’t believe I’ve had enough linear footage of bookshelf since I began seriously buying books for my own pleasure. That would have been about forty-five years ago now. Recently my husband erected two bookcases totaling fifty-six linear feet of bookshelf. Do I still have books on the floor? Does a bear—well, you know.

The root cause looks simple enough; too many books, too little space. But let me ask you this: have you ever considered just why there is too little space?

Oh, sure, part of it is the breeding habits of books. Left to themselves, and particularly in piles, books produce other books in mysterious ways that have nothing to do with publishers and warehouses and transactions in bookstores.

But part of it, I’m convinced, is a grand conspiracy between the people who make furniture and the people who make books. Maybe a conspiracy with black magic and demons in it.

I can see it now. In some smoky back room somewhere, the movers and shakers in the furniture world and book world got together. A circle with mystic runes drawn in carpenters’ chalk on the floor, weird incantations from the pages of Publishers Weekly, a few interns’ souls promised in exchange and presto! A deal with the devil to guarantee that no book-owner anywhere. unless she bought nothing but Penguin paperbacks, would ever be able to fill a shelf with books all exactly the same size.

Don’t believe me? Look at your bookshelves. If they’re like mine, chances are the top edge of your row of books looks like a cross-section of corduroy road. There are taller books at the ends and shorter ones in the middle, and books lying flat on top of the shorter ones. And I’ll bet you, too, that the space between the top of the bookcase and the ceiling is too low to get another row of books into.

So there’s wasted space, a shelf that has to be fourteen inches high because three of the twenty-eight books on it are that tall. A handful of ten-inch paperbacks forcing the height of another shelf up an inch. A four-inch gap on the top suitable for collecting knick-knacks and dust. On my two new bookcases, that adds up to eight linear feet of shelf I can’t use.

There are two solutions. One is to buy another bookcase. The furniture people are happy.

The other is to buy enough fourteen-inch-tall books to fill that shelf. The booksellers are happy.

Of course, the fourteen-inchers push the shorter books out to pile up on the floor, where they will breed and, eventually, force you to buy more bookcases. The furniture people are happy.

And when you finally do get that new bookcase, guess if you’ll have space left over. Of course you will. You’ll have to buy more books, because compared to how a book-owner feels about empty shelf space, nature is mildly annoyed at a vacuum. The book publishers are happy.

Tell me this isn’t somehow diabolical, I dare you!

If anyone out there is even thinking of suggesting simply taking out the fourteen-inch book and letting it lie flat on top of the others, bite your tongue! Books lying flat on other books are incriminating evidence of a lack of enough shelf space.

Excuse me, I have to go out to the bookstore now. There’s a space on my shelf, and I don’t have a book the right size to fill it.

Elizabeth Creith lives and writes in Northern Ontario, where she lives with her husband, cat and dog and several thousand books. She blogs about writing and life at the Scriptorium. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .