Bookish broad

As some of you may know, I have books. I don’t seem to be able to go anywhere without picking up one or two…or twenty.

There’ve been trips to London where I went up and down Charing Cross Road buying books—to the point that my luggage had to be hand searched at Heathrow because the X-rays wouldn’t penetrate the dense layer of literature. Once I had to buy a gym bag at a London street market to accommodate all my additions.

And then there was the trip to Paris, when I bought so many at museums and bookstores I had to take a taxi to the Gare du Nord because I knew that even with wheeled bags I wouldn’t be able to get across the correspondance of the Métro (where there are beaucoup de stairs). The guy who helped lift my bags onto the Eurostar is probably still walking funny.

Or the jaunt across the Channel to Normandy. On my return the boot of my car was filled with equal weights of books and Champagne.

When my London household was being moved back to the US, one of the packers commented that he’d never seen so many books. (Or shoes, but that’s a different matter entirely.) I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was only packing three bookcases and I had five more at home.

Luckily my Virginia house had two stair landings large enough to accommodate two bookcases each, and I was able to put six cases in the office upstairs for history and reference; three downstairs for fiction, poetry and psychology; two on the upper landing for arts and children’s lit; and two on the lower landing for travel, literature, classics, drama, etc. Oh—and one on the main floor by the kitchen for cookbooks.

The books were the prime challenge when it came to finding a permanent home here. Once I liked a place I had to start imagining where the cases would go, and one by one the prospects got crossed off the list. With some people it's the grand piano; with me it's the books. (At least 70% of them and all but five of the cases spent the last ten months in storage, so getting them out where I can read them is a major endorphin rush.)

Okay, so on this last move, distributing my collection over the three floors, it occurred to me that perhaps it’s time to cull the collection some. I mean—I did give away a couple of cartons worth when I left Virginia, things that were really tatty or duplicates. And I got the collection down to around 2700. But I thought maybe I could cut back some more.

So I went through with a machete—I mean, I was utterly ruthless, hacking left and right on three floors. (The landings here aren’t big enough for bookcases.) and I’ve pulled out a grand total of…twelve books.

I refuse to confess to being pathetic. Maybe it's a Bas Bleu thing.