These are not my bookshelves, but Morales photo provides a vivid approximation

Alfons Morales Photo on UnSplash

Sometime next week I hope to post the first of a one- or two-part reaction to Diana Athill’s memoir Somewhere Towards the End. Perhaps it will be a Christmas day present, this delightful, uninhibited British woman whose book editing I would have surely admired if it were half as good as her own candid voice on the page.

I mentioned in a prior post (November 4, 2020) Athill’s later-in-life stabs at her own more expansive personal writing. She had mostly limited herself to reviewing books for the Literary Review before taking up memoir. She is, she said, “puzzled by something which I share with a good many other oldies: I have gone off novels.” They were her steady diet as she became a reader and through fifty years as a publisher of fiction by no less than V.S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys. But old age has made her “pernickety,” a word from the Scottish dialect of English and describing an excessive attention to small details, a word we Americans would more readily recognize if spelled persnickety.

As she aged, Athill wanted hard, cold “fed facts” but those seem increasingly hard to come by in the time of Trumpism, with its alternative facts and fake news. It has become a perilous world for truth-seekers and one no less so as I consider how to choose what to read as my days dwindle. There is no dearth of choices to accommodate my interests and needs. So where should I look? Forward or back? I have been discomfited by the disappearance of agreement in favor of conflict. When young we were taught right from wrong. Who can say now? One person’s opinion is considered as good as another’s—even it is decidedly not and wrongheaded.

Is the answer a deeper and keener rereading of the books that have most affected me? Or, is it plunging into the new—material, that as Athill put it, “extends the region in which my mind can wander?” I am working toward an answer; it is somewhere on my richly and heavily laden bookshelves, awaiting discovery.

This much I know: Being physically surrounded by books, read and unread, has been more than a décor choice. A room without bookshelves has always looked to me as if it were missing an element as essential as walls. Others disagree, I’ve been reminded by the other booklover in our house who discovered during an open-house visit to our former home that a subsequent owner had ripped out the built-in bookshelves that could have accommodated something else if the person had no taste for the written word. In any case, it seemed a waste of good shelving, regardless its use.

That could sound off-putting, as if I’m looking down on chachkies, bric-a-brac, and knickknacks and inflating the value of books. In other words, engaging in elitist palaver and comparison. I’m not. It is a challenge to think about which decorative choices enhance one’s life. The mobile decorative items that come down from my bookshelves will become a principal source of future blog posts, including football.

When eBooks first appeared I mistakenly believed that I had found an answer to my unending purchases for hardcover and paperback, mostly trade, for which there was no more room. The second bedroom has for the more than 30 years we have inhabited our condominium been referred to as “the desk room.” It is, more accurately, my writing/junk room, with a big, old, scarred wooden desk I inherited from Daddy and two mismatched, portable bookshelves (if compared to built-ins) that have caught the overflow from the living room’s wall-to-wall bookshelves and those in the loft that lurks pleasantly above.

We had both built and installed—so they too are removable—the loft wall-to-wall oak bookshelves, by the Amish craftsmen who put in the kitchen and bathroom cabinets (since replaced) and those into which a wet bar was installed on the wall opposite the living room bookshelves. The latter cream-colored painted bookshelves, with sliding-glass doors in between and below them, were built by one person and painted by another. These skilled workmen cared about their work, none more than artisan Rick Hines, a one-man construction gang who, after updating both bathrooms, returned to replace and improve the wet-bar cabinetry, sink, and countertops (from composite to granite) and, as a finishing touch, added matching bookshelves on either side. Rick was here so long we thought we probably could claim him as a dependent on our taxes.

My wife Jackie thought Rick had become an enabler of our addiction when he suggested adding the wet-bar bookshelves, but she liked them so much she invited Rick to return to cut giant holes in the dining-room wall to add three windows above two existing ones that had never allowed in enough light to ward off the gray winter days.

(I realize this post has turned into the definition of an essay, what with its diversion from books per se to the shelves that are their home and make our home what it is.) Now, back on course, comes the challenge, and it goes beyond choosing what to read.

I have to find it, and that is next to impossible.

I have never stopped buying physical books in favor of eBooks, though I do now try to limit my purchases and tend to spend the most on a few books from the Folio Society in London, with which Diana Athill was no doubt familiar. Their books are incomparable in quality and artistry, to the point I have bought the Folio version of books already in my library. It may have been just as well, because I probably could not have easily located the original whereas the Folio imprints practically jump off the shelves into eager hands.

Organization has never been my strong point. About a dozen computers ago I had what would now be referred to as an app that alphabetized and helped me identify where in the sprawling library the books were located. Then one new computer—always Apple—could not accommodate the form and so all was lost, literally and figuratively. Especially as applied to the loft section of the library, where the bookshelves are deepest.

Double rows of books stand like sentinels at the ready, one hiding the other from the seeker of truths. Their weight has warped the shelving and I fear they will one day crash to the floor below. If the books don’t kill me, maybe they reveal themselves and I can find the right reads for the days ahead.