Books do furnish a room, to quote the title of the 10th book (of 12) in English writer Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time series of novels, which chronicle life in Britain between 1921 and 1971. The 10th novel chronicles the narrator’s time at a publishing firm as he attempts to return to normal life after the war, and books are very much on his mind, along with the minds of everyone else at the firm.
Books were very much on my mind recently, as we undertook a massive clear-out at our house. We’re neither of us anywhere near what you would call hoarders, but over the course of our lives — separately and together — we’ve accumulated a lot of stuff. Some of it fell firmly in the “Don’t throw it out, it might be useful one day” category; some of it held sentimental value; some of it had outlived any former usefulness but was hanging around through ennui on our part; and some of it had been put away in drawers and cupboards and forgotten about.
I should note here that we are hardly alone in our accumulation of things that we neither want nor need anymore, and that our son is never going to want or need either. Indeed, a friend told me recently that if you’re of a certain age, and haven’t had occasion to move or downsize recently, the greatest gift you can give your children is to go through your things and start getting rid of stuff, so that they don’t have to do it.
The sad truth is that all those china cabinets and sideboards, all those huge dining tables with their set of six (or eight or 10) matching chairs, all those massive sofas and coffee tables, simply aren’t what the younger generation want these days, even if they had room for them, which they don’t. As for the china and glassware and serving dishes, all the tchotchkes and knick-knacks you’ve hung on to: don’t make your kids have to get rid of them.
But back to the books. As any book lover will tell you, it’s nigh on impossible to get rid of books. Oh, you have the best of intentions, but as you start pulling volumes off the shelves you begin leafing through them, and read a bit here and there, and decide that you might want to go back and re-read them properly one day (you won’t), and at the end of two hours you have perhaps half-a-dozen titles that can go to the little red bookshelf at Safety Mart (and even fewer than that once your spouse goes through them and decides one or more of them are keepers after all).
Still, we had to do something. We have somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 books at home, currently shelved on 20 bookcases scattered around the house, and if you’re wondering how we fit that many books on 20 bookcases: well, most are tall, and you don’t know the joys of double-stacking. That said, they are (more or less) sorted by subject, which means that even with two rows of books on many shelves, one of us can put our hand on any given title within 30 seconds.
One of the bonuses was that I was finally able, through reorganization, to get all of my books about Canadian history in general, B.C. history in particular, and B.C. Interior history specifically, together, and a very satisfying bulk they possess. Ditto for my books on mountaineering, on Arctic and Antarctic exploration, on the Titanic and other disasters on the high seas. I discovered that I have half-a-dozen books about the Donner Party, slightly more than that on the Battle of Little Bighorn, all of which had been scattered and are now together.
As for the books that were disposed of: check the red bookshelf at Safety Mart. And if you see my husband trying to take any of them back, let me know. He had his chance . . .
