Gallery Bookshop - Tony Miksak's Words On Books

Tony Miksak's
Words on Books
as broadcast weekly on KZYX radio

I Live in a Room Stuffed with Books

I live in a room stuffed with books. Many of you do as well.
From where I sit I can see trees, a squirrel, the odd passing cat or flock of turkeys. That's the window view. Everywhere else I look it's books, books, books.
On my right: A complete 20-volume set of the The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians copyright 1980.
Also: Guidebooks to various computer programs; travel books that don't fit on the other travel book shelves in this room; a 1907 set of The Life & Works of Abraham Lincoln, commemorative edition, partially bound in red leather; a boxed set in the original French of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust, some Boswell, a bit of Dostoyevsky, The Fundamentals of Musical Art, Volume 10 which was a gift signed by two friends in 1990.
Those titles cover maybe 20 feet of shelves. There are 14 more eight foot-high cabinets in this small study. I admit it is lovely to be so surrounded. As if I had read even half these books. As if I ever will read most of them.
On her book blog this week Barbara Vey asks, "To Keep or Not to Keep?"
"...What benefit do I get from titles staring me down? Why daily expose my conscious brain to Kafka and Chekhov randomly placed next to Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, and Aldo Leopold? I'll never read those books again. (Will I?) Just because they came into my possession doesn't mean I have to keep them. Possession! I loved that book by A. S. Byatt. Where did I put my copy? Don't tell me I got rid of it!" she writes.
I know that feeling so well that recently I purchased a hand-held scanner and the software to go along with it so I may catalog my collection, and find out how many duplicate copies I have and where my books are in the first place.
What prevents me from carrying out this plan is the certain knowledge that before entering all these books into a database I must organize them so the computer can guide me to a title it thinks I own.
How to make sense of such a crazily diverse group of books? Maybe I will label the shelves One Two Three and so on. Then the computer can report that Photo Retouching & Restoration For Dummies has a spot on shelf three, cabinet four. Or worse yet, physically move these books into categories... Do historical novels shelve with Fiction or History? Is it all Fiction? Should Dickens sit next to Dick? Cornwell near Calvino, Chaucer on the same shelf as Churchill?
As someone once asked in the bookstore, "Where is your NON-fiction section?" I had to think about that for a minute.
Right now I get along on memory and intuition. I remember holding a monograph on the ant. I was over by that chair, and the book had a blue cover. I'm pretty sure it's still there, if I didn't move it.
Gliding along a wall of multi-hued books I randomly pick out an advance uncorrected proof of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, & the Fault Line Between Reason & Faith by David L. Ulin.
Back when I was an active bookseller, I probably said to a sales person, "Could you send me a copy of that earthquake book? Even though I'm not going to buy it for the store, maybe I'll do a Words of Books on it." That was six years ago. I really should dust more often.
Blogger Barbara Vey asks what should we do with books we may never read, or never read again? The first problem, for me, starts with the fact these are BOOKS, not week-old newspapers or burrito wrappers.
I could give some to friends, or swap with strangers on the Internet, but I'd just be exchanging one unread book for another. I offered a look-see to a used book dealer, but he turned me down. He has too many books, too.
I could give books to a local thrift store, but I'd probably end up buying some of them back, and anyway, could they possibly use them, or would they end up one cent-sale-ing them into a box in the rain? It's horrible to contemplate.
In the meantime, I live in a room stuffed with books. A few are valuable first editions, some so useless they really should go out with the burrito wrappers.
Taken together, I admit, these books provoke in me a quiet joy. They are silent friends, ready to speak in their many voices, never insisting on being heard. Eyes and hands will find them again one day.

Aired Sunday February 28, 2010 at 10:55 am and Wednesday March 3, 2010 at 1:00 pm

NOTES:

Barbara Vey's blog at Publishers Weekly got me thinking about all this. http://www.publishersweekly.com/blog/Beyond_Her_Book/31051-To_Keep_or_Not_to_Keep.php
An excellent software source for cataloging books, music, your just-about-anything you have a lot of... http://www.collectorz.com/
A national directory of thrift stores. http://www.thethriftshopper.com/
A recent list of "The 10 Best Websites To Swap Books, Movies, Games & CDs" http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-best-bookcrossing-websites/

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