No End of Books

"I...had always thought of Paradise

In form and image as a library."

Jorge Luis Borges, "Poem of the Gifts"

"My library

Was dukedom large enough."

Prospero, The Tempest

If Thoreau was right that one's wealth may be measured by how much one can do without, that is, the smallness of one's needs rather than the mass of one's possessions, then the Internet and Kindle, etc. are making readers rich beyond the dreams of avarice. As the (then) seven-year-old put it recently, "Daddy, why do you have so many books in the house? Don't you know that you can read books on the computer?"

And yet Nathan Schneider, among many others I'm sure, claims a role for books going well beyond the textual information they contain. For him they are a "theater of memory," a personal (and collectively, a cultural) record of imaginative and intellectual development. And David Brooks argues that books, in contrast to the chaotically egalitarian Internet, embody standards of intellectual hierarchy and wisdom.

What of print culture will survive? Not physical newspapers, surely. For many years a faithful newspaper subscriber (and long ago a delivery "boy"), I am now appalled that, daily, countless trees are sacrificed, and countless gallons of gasoline burned, so that bundles of paper may be dropped on porches to be briefly perused before passing (one hopes) to the recycling bin, when the same information may be transmitted by the energy cost of turning on the computer for a few minutes. To be sure, this information should be paid for, and it remains economically perplexing that one has access to so much free information online.

While not a hoarder per se, I used to stockpile magazines and journals (no more). Will weeklies and monthlies survive in paper form, if only for doctors' offices? They would seem to have a better chance than newspaper, but probably not, still, a good chance. Their value does not significantly transcend the textual information they contain.

What of books then? I have been considering another winnowing of my library--what is indispensable in paper form? Three categories, I would argue. First, and most straightforwardly, are the art, photography, and graphic design books, which are frank objects of beauty in their own right. Second, there are books of, one might trivially and misleadingly say, "sentimental" interest, that is, books that, when they catch my eye on the shelf, evoke a memorable experience of imagination or thought in my life (ranging from the relatively picayune, such as Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series, read in the summer of 1982, to quasi-respectable professional works of recent years). Third are the classics, however considered, that is, those texts that embody such value for me that at any given time I wouldn't want to have to depend on anything beyond visible light for the reading of them, and certainly not upon electrical power, Internet access, or the vicissitudes of any electrical device. Once acquired, a book provides near-perfect freedom which, short of frank theft of destruction, cannot be taken away.

Books will survive in some form for the same reason that, even in the age of reproduction, original art and live performance survive: as bodily creatures, we crave and require more than just information. We need tactile experience. Books will become fewer and more expensive, and people will become far more selective in what they choose to shelve, but they will survive. What will vanish into readable cyberspace will be the teeming fields of routine fiction and fact, texts that are diverting or useful for a month or a year. Those that prove their worth to following generations will pass into paper. For those who care about such things, personal and cultural libraries will remain anchors of intellectural and imaginative memory and identity. Like churches, museums, and parks, books will persist, even in diminished numbers, as quasi-sacred artifacts of thinking bodily creatures.

Enough Already

"The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book."

Samuel Johnson

"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye."

Milton, Areopagitica

The last couple of years have involved a good deal of packing and moving, into and out of homes and offices. Books do not travel particularly well. They are weighty, they are easily nicked on the corners, and their myriad shapes and sizes seem designed to fatally vex their efficient packing into boxes. The other day, gazing upon such boxes stacked in closets, their contents accessible only in theory, I was seized by an impulse to purge the library. Last year I had conducted a purge, but this would be a larger one.

How many books does one need, particularly in the age of Kindle and the Internet, where many of the classics in particular are perennially available if one doesn't mind reading from a screen (granted, a big if)? And if one does suddenly crave a particular book, it is only a click and a day or two away. In my current demesne I have roughly 50 bookshelves worth of space divvied up among a number of bookcases of various sizes, and their contents leave perhaps half again as many books in boxes. Grossly estimating an average of 20 books per bookshelf, I gauge my library at around 1500 volumes. This doesn't sound as many as I may have thought, but due to upgrades made over the years most of these are hardbacks or substantial paperbacks.

I am no Thomas Jefferson, obviously, but he has always been a figure of fascination for me as for many others, and not least because of his famous library. His ideal was the erudite and cultured pastoral gentleman, and for most of human history, of course, if you wanted to live far from the city, you had to bring your culture with you. That he certainly did (thanks in part I suppose to slave labor). I read that he had between 9000 and 10000 volumes, a staggering number now, and a stupendous one then. But when the young Library of Congress was burned by the British in 1814, he sold over 6000 of his books to restock the institution. Presumably he realized that one man, no matter his genius or the flow of visitors to his doorstep, could not possibly make regular use of 10000 books.

One person can't make regular use of 1000 books either. But there are a substantial minority that I do dip into again and again, if only to revisit a chapter or look up a phrase. There are a number that I love for their sheer physical beauty; the arts books obviously fall in that category, but many others do too. And of course a number arouse various kinds of nostalgia, because they were gifts from special people, or because they bring to mind a certain phase of life or state of mind. Someday a 1000 book collection may be a veritable antique in the house--that day may come sooner rather than later--but no matter how prodigious the Internet becomes, a stocked bookcase will always mean the life of the mind to me.

These books have been amassed at a fairly regular pace over the past 25 years, with spurts here and there as cash flow permitted. For many years I couldn't get enough, and disdained the very notion of the public library. Why would I give a book my time--than which commodity nothing arguably is more precious--if I didn't want to keep it with me? It was bad enough that I couldn't hold onto periodicals. But there comes a point where even words and ideas can become clutter, and I don't have Jefferson's Monticello--or his slaves--to best store and manage this library.

So after several hours of sifting (yes, one's hands can become sore from the sheer handling of books), a dozen boxes--probably some 200-300 volumes--are going, whether to used book stores or wherever they can find a home. They range from genre fantasy from the mid-1980's to philosophy and professional books from just a couple of years ago that left me underwhelmed. A few of them, bought already well-used 20 years ago, will find no home, and of course the used-book stores won't take them all. How are dead books best disposed of? With fall coming on, we could use some extra fuel for the fire pit out back which the kids love. But no, not that.