I spent Saturday organizing my books. Most bibliophiles would presume that someone that owns as many books as me would already have them in a very particular order. Organized by subject, sub-topic, author, and publication date. What's that you say? You know someone who has it in alphabetical order? Obscene. I'll be by in the hour to take away their Bibliophilic Association of America Membership Card.I guess mine would have been taken away too. It was really a disgrace the other day when I tried to find a book and it took me 15 minutes of pulling items off the shelves, asking David if he's seen it, accusing David of having moved it, and finally giving up. And then start searching again 10 minutes later, because I know I saw it on the top right of one of the cases when I was clearing stuff off the table. Eventually I found it, though nowhere near where I expected it to be. Wanting to avoid such a situation again, I felt that perhaps it was time to organize my books.
Now, I don't know how others approach their spring cleaning. But I find that generally, in order to organize something, you have to make things a bit messier for awhile. In this case, a lot messier. I first removed every single book from the case and began making "piles" of subjects to sort them into. Fiction, Poetry, Philosophy, Gender Studies, Drama, etc. You get my point. However, the only place I can sort these many books (I have well over 300, even after I did some "cleaning out" a year ago) is my bed. I pulled back the curtain to let in all the sun I was missing out on, and began covering my bed with books.
Hardcovers, trade and mass market paperbacks. Brand new books from B&N and Borders, used books from the Strand and my college library. Books I had read, books I had started, books I never got the chance to read. Books that I had borrowed or had been lent to me with a recommendation. I tried to sort them into categories, but soon the piles began blurring into one another. If I stacked them too high, they would fall over. If I wasn't careful where I put pressure on the bed, the books would slide into each other, unable to tell where one group began and another ended. Occasionally I had a dilemma about how to catalog a book--Does this go into philosophy or gender studies?--but I tried to be decisive.
With almost all the bookcases emptied and dusted, I sat down in my computer chair to relax. I turned the chair and noticed something that I'd somehow missed:
While I was sorting books, I'd been putting all my notebooks and journals onto the table. One atop of another, atop of another, until then there was this tower. How many are there? Thirty-one. Yes, there are 31 notebooks, 1 set of cards and envelopes, and 1 journal that belongs to David. Thirty-one journals that I bought or was gifted. Not a single one of them is completely filled. Heck, some of them I haven't even written in yet. Of those written in, I have notebooks that go as far back as when I was in high school. Random entries from when I was trying to instill the habit of writing everyday. We can see how that went...I wasn't sure if I should keep them or burn them, so I went back to work. Once I'd finished un-shelving and dusting, I began sorting the fiction titles by their author's last name. Going around the table, I soon had 12 piles of letter groups. I seem to have a lot of books written by people whose last names begin with a C, F or G. And then the re-stacking began. By the time I'd filled two bookcases, my back was starting to ache. But unready to deal with the 31, I pushed forward. Slowly the books began to reappear on the shelves, and all I was left with was the Pile.
I began flipping through the journals, reading a sentence here, a paragraph there. Just musings about how my day went, what I hoped college would be like, ticket stubs of movies and readings I'd been to. To save shelf space, I thought of ripping out the pages I had written on, and gluing them into another notebook. Or maybe just throwing them all away in a very Goldberg-Buddhist moment. I couldn't part with them though. Though the idea of continuing a journal that I left off 7 years ago seems off, there is something satisfying by that prospect at the same time. Now, I don't know if I'll actually do this. But recently I've been writing in a notebook that I purchased at the end of February. So far, it's been going rather well. Perhaps it's the start of a new approach. Or maybe 7 years from now, I'll just toss them all away, and start anew.
Now I just need to actually read the books.
P.S. Though all I did was rearrange them and dust the shelves, I'll be damned if they don't look brand new.
P.P.S. For those wondering how Pride and Prejudice is going...don't ask.
