The bibliophile’s dilemma

I have too many books.

They fill a long wall in the family room and are jammed into available corners of the living room. They dominate two sides of the office, a number of shelves and populate bookcases all over the house, including on the landing between the sets of stairs. They are stuck in nooks and crannies wherever we have found a nook or a cranny.

These are, of course, real books, not flickering lights on a technologic marvel where you can adjust the font and the brightness. They are not words you hear from a disembodied voice while doing the long drive to the beach. These are tangible books, where you can feel the pages as you turn them and where you can dog-ear a page that holds a sentence or paragraph that you think you want to remember but probably won’t.

These are books that are shiny and new, recent names in the New York Times Book Review, and also ones that are old, with stained covers and cracked spines and pages that crumble into yellowed flakes when you turn them. There are Dell paperbacks from the fifties which cost, indeed, 50 cents, and new 400-page generational sagas that cost as much as a reasonable dinner out.

I have books I bought last week and ones I have kept from when I was in middle school, back when it was still called junior high. (Over there, I can see it from my desk: “Kon-Tiki,” by Thor Heyerdahl. I loved it when I was 12.)

There are novels, lots and lots of novels—including all of Graham Greene and all of Elmore Leonard, most of Philip Roth and a leather-bound set of all of Dickens, which, I think, I bought many years ago at a garage sale. And a good array of nonfiction, too, from a history of the Mary Tyler Moore Show to “The Book of Mindfulness” to the wonderful “Travels with Epicurus.”  

There are reference books (all the obvious ones, plus several English-French dictionaries, plus a history of rock and roll, a guide to opera, “The New York Public Library Science Desk Reference,” plus a history of news (Mitch wrote that one).

By the breakfast nook, there are so many cookbooks with so many recipes, none of which I’ve ever actually tried to make, except, maybe, for Elizabeth David’s risotto milanese. There are large-format, photo-heavy coffee table books both on the coffee table and on the taller shelves of some of the bookcases, everything from “Serenissima: Venice in Winter” to “Baseball Anthology” to “Primitive Art of the 20th Century” (both volumes).

There are books written by friends and colleagues and books written by authors I’ve never heard of about subjects I’ve never contemplated and sometimes I have no idea why or when I obtained some of these books.

A lot of these books I’ve read; a good number I haven’t, and I need to admit probably never will. At my age, I’ll never even get around to reading all the ones I really want to read. Or read again the ones I’ve loved and had hoped to get back to. And my wife and I are now at the point in our lives when we say we don’t want to leave all this mess of books for our kids to have to clean out when we’re gone (along with all the papers and old photos they’re going to have to sift through).

But still I find it almost impossible to get rid of any of the books (the only exception is when, totally by accident, we find that we have two of the same Anne Tyler novel or a paperback and a hardback of one of John Updike’s Rabbit books; we find this out, however, only occasionally, since our books are not organized in any systemic way).

  All the shelves are so tightly packed I seemingly can’t jam any new books in there, but yet I keep buying new books (and finding a spot for them) and keep refusing to get rid of old ones.

My wife has forbidden me to go to the local library’s biannual fundraising book sale where, on the Sunday, you can fill a bag with all the books it will hold, for ten bucks. I have a very large beach bag. Sometimes, I sneak over to the sale, fill the beach bag, keep it in the trunk of the car and wait for my wife to not be at home. Then I search for any new nook or cranny.

If I had to explain it, I’d say it’s just that books feel like an essential part of me, of the atmosphere of my home, more important to my sense of who I am or think I am than the fancy dishes we get out for company or the new air fryer we just bought or the art and photographs on the walls. Or maybe they are just part of the image I’d like to project—both to myself and to others—that I’m a smart, well-read, intellectual type.

Or maybe it’s because I look at my books sometimes and they trigger memories: that one, there, I read it on that Orient Express; the other one, over there, I picked up in the used-book section at Shakespeare & Company.  Another one was given to me by a friend I haven’t seen in 25 years, at least. I still remember how he loved it, and it helps me remember him.

Or maybe it’s as simple as the title of Anthony Powell’s tenth novel of his twelve-novel sequence, “A Dance to the Music of Time”: indeed, “Books Do Furnish a Room.”

I only have three of those twelve. I’d like to get the other nine.