Putting My House (in Other Words, My Books) in Order

I have a lot of books: 3,642 when I last counted, although I bought three more today. On the other hand, I've actually set aside a couple hundred of those to get rid of in the last week, which may seem like a drop in the bucket to you but feels like a pound of flesh to me. I've spent most of the last week or so in a task I and my wife have been looking forward to for some time: putting our books in some sort of order. For years, books have been sitting around in boxes brought home from work and in piles on tables and the floor. That may make it sound worse than it was--the house remained navigable and more or less presentable throughout--but it was driving us--mostly her--a low grade of crazy.

Now there are still some piles on the floor, because I haven't quite finished the job (I need to build some more shelves to fit the last few dozen!), but for the most part everything is in its place, which took longer and exhausted me more than I imagined, in part because I had the bright idea of putting the books in order in the basement, where there was room to lay them out, which added a floor or two of climbing with every stack I brought down and then back up.

Here is how the basement looked at its peak. The nonfiction room (there were some more stacks around the corner):

And the fiction (or at least B, C, D, E, J, K, L, M):

For tears my/our books (my wife reads plenty and has brought a fair number of them into the house, but we all know that I'm the one with the problem) were organized by a simple but idiosyncratic method of which I was, for a time, quite proud: alphabetically by title. I had tried a few failed systems before that--by publication date (too hard to maintain), by color (made me nauseous)--so I was very pleased when I found one that I believed in, and I was quite happy to explain its merits at length (and often did).

But that arrangement wore out its novelty and its welcome, and in my older age I've turned back to tradition: the fiction is now alphabetical by author, the nonfiction by subject (and fairly standard subjects at that, aside from a few personal specialties like Cities, Money, New Yorker Writers, Fake Memoirs (you know who you are!), and Nixon). And now Laura might actually be able to find the Alice Munro book she's looking for, rather than having them scattered about the house. (Can you remember the titles of Alice Munro books? No one can. It's the one thing she can't write well. Speaking of which, it's always bothered and/or fascinated me that The Lives of Girls and Women, the one of her titles seemingly most suitable, in its plurality, for the title of a story collection--although nearly indistinguishable from the later The Love of a Good Woman--is actually the name of her only novel.)

I expect this won't be the last you'll hear about the Big Reorg--in particular, Mark O'Connell had a nice piece on personal libraries in the age of e-books on the Millions earlier this week that I hope to respond to--but in the meantime, I'll leave you with before and after images of another special section, my dear NYRB Classics (which Laura will also be happy to have in one place for a change):

Comments

[Jenny]

So, Tom, have you actually READ all those books? Or are you still working your way through them?

I found the easiest way to keep my book shelves manageable is to force my friends to read my favorite books, so a good portion is always out on loan. This worked until one too many trips to the Strand in NYC (another one coming up soon), so now I have piles by my bedside that make getting up for a late night water a little dangerous.

[Tom]

Ha--not by a long shot. It's a very aspirational collection. (And if I do the math, it's depressing to realize that I probably don't have time to get through them all even if I get the two-score-and-change years still coming to me...

I'm not so good about loans (I even had to think twice about letting Laura run off to the woods with our only copy of Transit of Venus this week--what if I needed it!?!), but maybe if I did (and didn't get them back) I would have the pleasure of buying copies of books I loved without actually adding to my collection.

[Mary Bacon]

"For tears" for sure, Tom. Those of any housekeeper who has to dust around, over, whatever.

[Alex Carr]

Amazing collection, Tom. More pics and keep us posted on the progress, please!

[Vick Mickunas]

Looks like my place...