« Back to Article

Just cleaning out the bookshelves

Updated 3:02 am, Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Larger | Smaller
Email This
Font
Page 1 of 1

It is the time of necessary deacquisition in our house. We instituted the first five-year plan five years ago, and it stated, "No book shall come into the house unless another one leaves." That worked out pretty well, and the public library got some good books from us. I hope they sold them or at least used them.

But that proved not to be enough. Things were piling up in my office - grandchild things, for instance, now outgrown and unused; scuba gear and birding accessories, now sadly underutilized. And pieces of paper that were important once, and tchotchkes commemorating various skips and twirls in our dance to the music of time.

Look, there's an eagle feather with something painted on it. There's a box of Beechies gum. There's a baseball signed by George Bell. There's an award I was given by someone for something; it was all so long ago.

And behind it all, books. Literally behind it; two floor-to-ceiling bookcases in my study alone. These are books that have already survived several rounds of pruning and clearing. And yet it looks like 50 percent is the target reduction point. That may be impossible.

Gosh, staring at the bookcase really makes it seem impossible. Let me pick one at random.

Edgar Allan Poe, "Forty-Two Tales." A clever publisher's collection of the Poe short stories, including "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Murders in the Rue Morgue." I turn the pages and words jump out at me. "Sphinx, "mandible," "Mesmer," "ossification," "impetuously down the chimney." That's Poe territory, all right.

I read that stuff as an adolescent, mostly. I love the grand spookiness of it all, the solemnity, the acceleration of the storytelling. Poe doesn't come up in conversation much these days; maybe we need a controversial biography of him to stir up some attention.

John le Carre, "The Honourable Schoolboy." This decision is so easy, which makes it so hard. Of course I'm going to get rid of it. Its pages are yellow, its type is too small for me now, it smells very faintly of mildew and insect droppings.

But I loved the le Carre of that period. "The Honourable Schoolboy" isn't as good as "A Perfect Spy," but it was still pretty good. I liked having it around, but it must go, like those Michael Innes and John Dickson Carr and Edmund Crispin mysteries I've been hanging on to forever.

Books are not forever. This was not a lesson ever taught to me in childhood.

A.A. Milne, "When We Were Very Young." Never got much of a chance to try Milne on my granddaughter; I suspect it's outdated. My daughters liked him, and I grew up with Winnie the Pooh and Eeyore and all that. (Alice got her Pooh from Disney, not from Milne.) And this isn't even Pooh; it's poems.

"They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace - Christopher Robin went down with Alice." Either that was part of your past or it wasn't. "Ernest was an elephant, a great big fellow, Leonard was a lion with a six foot tail, George was a goat and his beard was yellow, and James was a very small snail." Rum-pum-puddly sort of marching nursery poems, I always thought.

May have to keep this one. May want to keep its head above water.

Robert Louis Stevenson, "Island Landfalls." A canny collection of his letters, reportage and fiction set in Polynesia. I loved Stevenson when I was a kid, "Treasure Island" and "Kidnapped" and all that stuff. On my 50th birthday, Tracy and I went to Samoa and walked up a muddy hillside and visited Stevenson's grave.

So I want to keep this one, until I sneeze and I realize that this book as artifact is semi-toxic, a hotbed of allergens and thus unreadable, so keeping it would be exactly like keeping a souvenir shot glass. Books should not be objects of veneration; they should breathe and move around the home.

And that's the point of the exercise, really. Get rid of clutter that is the result of habit. Get rid of clutter that represents a refusal to make a decision.

Off to the library you go, "The March" by E.L. Doctorow and "World of Wonders" by Robertson Davies and "The Three Musketeers" by Alexandre Dumas and, yes, even you, old book by someone I know. Adieu, "Freakonomics"! So long, "Without a Stitch in Time" by Peter De Vries! Let all my little children go free, free, free.

Except for the ones I want to keep.

Take a hike, "Fatal Civil Aircraft Accidents." I can't afford the shelf space.

"And even if my head would go through," thought poor Alice, "it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like jcarroll@sfchronicle.com

 
http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Just-cleaning-out-the-bookshelves-3890630.php
www.sfgate.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-23
139192
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:DTSI6RIFJLBLN35U5BLRRUOHWCMAECE2
<urn:uuid:f39c6e0b-d800-4752-96c2-2b795ff9de2f>
2014-07-30T21:37:27Z
23.3.13.64
sha1:X3TET7ANZ2HWD7NPATKIE7OKSXTQBDNG
<urn:uuid:4e8d6032-cdf3-48bf-9fd0-1e67fb0d6006>
http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Just-cleaning-out-the-bookshelves-3890630.php
response
<urn:uuid:a680b632-7b56-47af-a03d-7f1b53bfceac>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-146-231-18.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-23
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for July 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf