Feature
Literary 2003: ESSAY
A Meditation on Owning Books
by Brian K. Mahoney; photo by Megan McQuade

In his book A History of Reading, the Argentinean-born writer Alberto Manguel recounts how he has had to “abandon [his books] several times, out of necessity.” Of his abandoned books Manguel notes, “I know that something dies when I give up my books, and that memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.”

Recently, I decided to review my own books, and pare down my collection, selling off whatever I didn’t believe was necessary to keep. I have never done this before. My life to this point has been spent amassing books, which to be honest, seemed like a virtuous endeavor. Now, I have not yet begun the process, and the act of selling off a portion of my library—such as it is, two thousand volumes or so—feels like an act of betrayal against the life of the mind, against the curatorial impulse, against my better angels.

While my fiancée, Lee Anne, had hinted over the past couple of years that I owned, perhaps, a superfluous number of books—noting as well that I amassed more each year; and that said books were creating a space management issue in our apartment, the decision to thin the herd was my own. (Lee Anne is very sensitive to boundaries, and that I have carted my books around with me, apartment to apartment for the past 10 years, was a point not lost on her.)

But after years of paying no heed to counsel advocating book disposal, the time finally seemed right to let go of some of my possessions. In doing so, I was creating space for the unnamed, as yet unforeseeable new. I was creating the space for possibility. (The same thought struck me this year with regard to my bachelorhood. Is my renunciation of my books related to getting hitched? Is this part of some compromise I’m thrusting on myself? Am I making space for what our shared future will bring? Should we register at Barnes & Noble?)

The books I own are no rare collector’s prizes. My library is mostly paperbacks and dog-eared hardbacks—one or two first editions, some signed copies by minor authors, but nothing really of note. The majority of the books I own are journeymen volumes, passed through many hands before mine. There is also no specific acquisition by subject. I possess a great interest in many topics and almost no book I have come across has not interested me in some way. A history of gamesmanship? The annotated ideas of Konrad Lorenz? The diaries of Joseph Goebbels? I have purchased them all.

When I moved to New York City after dropping out of college, I became obsessed with sidewalk book vendors; those men (and they were always men) who stood behind five or six folding tables piled with eclectic titles that were priced for only a dollar or two—everything from Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge to Nine Stories. (Admittedly, Salinger was hard to find, and the only copy of Nine Stories I ever saw on the street I swiped up.) I bought the majority of my library from these haphazard, streetwise bookstores. The tastes of these booksellers (or perhaps the circumstances of how they collected their books) informed my reading habits and the scope of my collection as much as any college professor or literature course.

I bought books from the balding nebbish in the sailor’s knit cap on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope who specialized in celebrity biographies, old magazines and the occasional novel by John Barth or Thomas McGuane. I purchased Schopenhauer and Vonnegut from the chain-smoking Russian émigré who worked the north side of Washington Square Park in front of NYU. I took recommendations from the homeless guy who spread his books out on a blanket near Columbus Circle. He turned me on to Gunter Grass and I bought him hot dogs from Gray’s Papaya.

And all the stops in-between where I picked up books: the dusty second-hand bookstores (science has yet to invent an agent capable of keeping old books dust-free), the garage sales where books were displayed in a little red wagon, the library books fairs where I picked up books by the bagful, the birthday and Christmas presents, the borrowed books never returned, the winter I spent systematically looting a Waldenbooks—now out of business—of whatever books would fit in the interior pocket of my overcoat. (I inadvertently discovered a love of Roman history through the pilfering of both volumes of Robert Graves’ Claudius books.)

I believed that the books I owned were, in a way, me—what was on my shelves was the physical manifestation of my intellect. A visitor to my home could glimpse the auto-didactic pastiche of my mind by reading the spines—Andre Gidé, Czeslaw Milosz, Alan Bloom, Stephen Jay Gould, Knut Hamsen—and get a sense of the quality of the gears turning upstairs. And while I was not wealthy and owned no fine possessions, I believed my library lent me a certain social standing, a complex symbolism of scholarship, intellectual probity, and the lingering whiff of aristocracy, leftover from a time when books were prized possessions, not disposable commodities. Or at least the illusion of such. (Manguel notes in his book that during the reign of Catherine the Great in 18th-century Russia, “a certain Mr. Klosterman made a fortune by selling long rows of binding stuffed with waste paper, which allowed courtiers to create the illusion of a library, and thereby garner the favor of their bookish empress.” But who was I trying to impress with this musty glamour other than myself?

For a long time, I took pride in the fact that I had read every book on my shelf. Pulling down a volume at random, I could discuss its particulars, its provenance (as thing, not as idea), its importance or historical context, and whether it was suitable for lending to the person I was talking to. At some point though, I could no longer do that. I had accumulated too many books too quickly. I had outpaced myself. The books I had bought in bagfuls at library fairs were going unread. My books took on the quality of antique furniture—seldom moved and requiring frequent dusting.

And when I started taking an inventory of my books, I realized that I had no reason whatsoever to own many of them. What use did I have for Suicide and Scandinavia? And when was I planning on reading the Warren Commission Report?

The whole method behind my bibliomania was based on fallacious premise: that I would find some time in the future to read all the books I was hoarding. A less busy time, time spent on a beach, or in a lake cottage with no phone or tv or demands of work. Where did I believe this time was coming from? Was there a window that was going to open on a time of pure reading—Freud in the morning, Faulkner in the afternoon, Woolf in bed?

I didn’t realize that in the future—that brilliant possibility—I would be less, not more able to spend idle hours reading as the thousand tasks multiplied around me that accrue as we age into greater incremental responsibilities.

So what to save and what to discard? First, I came up with some criteria. I would keeps books that I would either: definitely read again (The Master and Margarita), might read again (The Sun Also Rises), or might perhaps read again (A Tale of Two Cities). I would also keep: books that belong to Lee Anne, books I regard as reference (almost anything), books I’ll never read again but I would like to be able to recommend and lend (the novels of Don DeLillo), books I have no intention of reading but confer upon my bookshelves the heft and quality of a literate and learned person (A Concise Economic History of the World, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich), books written by people I know personally, and books that I know I’ll never read but retain in a vain attempt to shame myself into reading them (Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, Buddenbrooks, etc.).

These broad categories didn’t leave much room to discard anything, but I managed to find some books I really wanted to get rid of: anything by Camille Paglia, the Slacker Handbook, the novels of Vonnegut, anything by Ayn Rand, Meetings with Remarkable Men, Spike Lee’s basketball watching memoir Best Seat in the House, Naked Lunch (I stopped pretending I read it years ago), Iron John, any books on Zen or yoga, and a few dozen others.

My sweeping book removal was a bust. I just couldn’t part with my precious volumes. Two thousand minus a few dozen is still, for all intents and purposes, two thousand.

Clearing out a final bookshelf, running the pads of my fingers over the spines, I stumbled across a forgotten treasure—a hardcover, aquamarine (on the spine and tops of the pages) copy of The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, a collection of stories by the Irish writer William Trevor. The title story concerns Mike, a young man who spends an afternoon, evening, and late evening drinking with an old acquaintance who’s just turned up with two women, “pert shorthand typists with good figures.” While the rest of the group has a smashing time, carousing from bar to bar, Mike remains slightly aloof, from time to time makes phoning a woman named Lucy whom he seems to be infatuated with; yet Mike’s conversations with Lucy yield no definitive conclusion, and it’s apparent after the sixth phone call that Mike is clearly holding a flame for Lucy that she relinquished long before. At the last party, well after midnight, Mike stumbles out into the night air and catches his breath for a few minutes, away from the noise and the people. When he turns to go back in to the house, Mike realizes that the bond he and Lucy shared is coming undone, that he is losing his love for her.

“As I went back to the party the sadness of all the forgetting stung me. Even already, I thought, time is at work; time is ticking her away, destroying all there was between us. And with time on my side I would look back on the day without bitterness and without emotion. I would remember it only as a flash on the brittle surface of nothing, as a day that was rather funny, as the day we got drunk on cake.”

Reading that passage, surrounded by piles of books, it seemed to me that Trevor could have been writing a metaphor for the relationship I have with my books, these objects that are more than objects, more than mere possessions, but less than friends, less than confidantes. I fear parting with my books like I fear the loss of love—to part is to choose to forget. Collecting—any type of collecting, be it Barbie dolls or paper clips—is an act of remembrance. My books are a kind of record of my life; getting rid of them is like willfully choosing to forget.
I prefer to remember.