Moving With Books

Don’t. Leave them behind. Sell them. Give them away. But don’t move with them. Especially don’t ask your friends and relatives to help you move them. That is, if you want to continue to have friends and relatives. If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life as a hermit. (Of course, you could get a lot of reading done.)

If you insist on moving with books, do it yourself. The whole operation — packing the boxes, loading the boxes in the van, unloading the boxes from the van, unpacking the boxes, putting the books on the shelves. That is the only safe way to avoid being shunned, dropped, avoided, sued for back injuries, etc.

Recently we closed up our New York apartment and moved all our stuff to Philadelphia. I don’t know how we managed to crowd so much stuff into two rooms. Of course, the “stuff” was mostly MY books. Five bookcases full. I put a lot down in the Laundry Room for anyone to take. But that didn’t even make a dent in the amount. We still have to make one more car trip back to New York to collect the BIG books — the ones that wouldn’t fit in the boxes.

Now the Philadelphia house resembles a book warehouse, because it was full of books before we moved the new ones in. I can barely squeeze between the boxes to reach our bed. And I don’t know how much longer I can sleep with a box of books for a pillow. It will take us weeks to unpack and get things back to normal. Normal? What’s that? Oh, yeah, taking books out of the library and then returning them.

I could open a used bookstore tomorrow, if I so desired. The trouble is — I’d rather read than sell them. My fate is sealed. I’m an incurable bookaholic.

Future generations won’t have this problem. When they move, they’ll just tuck their Kindle or Nook or Whatever, under their arm and their library will be ready to go on moving day. They won’t even have to dust their precious volumes.

Robin Hathaway

Bookcases

One of the troubles with being a lover of books is that the books pile up, even when you're married to a librarian with his own public library to store books in. Everyone in Lambertville brings his excess books to the library, after all, hoping to find them a good home. But the public library is already full of books. Very few of the donations are put in the collection, and those that are must displace other books, which are thereupon deaccessioned. Which is to say, put on sale. Or worse, recycled.

I can see you blenching at the idea of destroying books. I tell you what, it depends on the books. Some books should have been pulped at birth. It may be that I myself wrote a couple of them. But I digress; I was talking about home storage.

I've never counted the number of books we own. Since the total is a moving target, such an activity would be a waste of time. I do have standards, however. Have the piles on the floor reached my knees? Worse, has Harold begun to stuff books into cardboard boxes? I hate cardboard boxes, unless they're coming in the door with shoes and dresses in them, to be emptied and put out with the recycling, or to be sealed up again with the original contents and sent back to Shoebuy or L.L. Bean or wherever. In no case are cardboard boxes to be filled with books and placed around the house as permanent fixtures.

A few weeks ago I noticed that cardboard boxes full of books were multiplying in dark corners of the house like an infestation of rats. Time to take action. Time to deaccession those books which we can bear to part with. Time to buy more bookcases to hold the rest.

So I went on Overstock.com and ordered three bookcases, just the right size to fit in our back hall as long as no one needs to use a wheelchair to get from our bedroom to the upstairs bathroom, which no one does so far, thanks be to God. They were handsome and inexpensive, made of coarse particle board with a microscopically thin veneer of mahogany, and they came, as you might expect, knocked down. The veneer was cracked and chipped in places but the Chinese manufacturer had kindly included in the plastic bag of parts a felt-tip pen the color of the veneer to fix it.

Shall I tell you of the other defects in quality control? Shall I complain about how the dowels were too narrow to fit snugly into the holes drilled for them, or how one of the cam thingies was not even threaded, or how two of the holes in one of the side pieces were drilled wrong? No. Instead of that I'll brag about how we put the three bookcases together in three days, working alternately and in tandem, switching off parts among the three until all the faults and defective bits (except for the chipped veneer) had been shifted to one last joint, which the resourceful Harold put together with new dowels, Gorilla Glue, and a huge clamp. Now to go load the bookcases up with books.

Probably they won't all fit. Tell you what. If you'd like some books, send me a stamped self-addressed cardboard box.

Kate Gallison