A
WRITER’S library is more than just a collection
of books. It is also a piecemeal biography of
that writer’s life, and measurably so, as most
writers have spent countless hours reading the
books that they own or have borrowed, hours that add up
to years, perhaps decades, given a long-enough life. My
library, accumulated over the past sixty years, makes per-
fect sense to me: It is a living illustration of my life, which
may or may not have to do with killing time, literary value,
collectability, books as attractive objects, information, and
nostalgia. It has served as a barrier against the howling
chaos that complicates the world. It has no apparent rhyme
or reason: a labyrinth of eccentricities. Its monetary value
is literally incalculable, since it’s essentially a storehouse
of memories that are worth a fortune to me, and yet it’s
true that the vast majority of the books in my collection
were bought cheap from used bookstores. No two writers’
libraries are alike, and it’s interesting what you can discover
about a writer’s life simply by looking at the books the
writer has elected to keep on hand.
Not long ago I was reading a collection of essays by
Hilaire Belloc titled One Thing and Another, and, as is
sometimes the case when I read other people’s essays, I
got the idea of writing this one. The “idea,” such as it was,
had nothing to do with the subject matter of any of the
forty essays contained in Belloc’s book; what struck me
was that the pages smelled as if they had been soaked in
gasoline. I remembered abruptly that it had smelled that
way when I’d bought it, and although it has sat on the
shelf in my study for twenty years, waiting to be read, the
odor hasn’t diminished. It could be fatal to light a match
anywhere near it.
This olfactory discovery sent me off in a nostalgic search
for my copy of Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney, which Phil
gave to me in 1975. My wife, Viki, and I took off on a road
trip a few days later in our old Volkswagen Bug, and I
brought the book along. It mysteriously disappeared early
one rainy morning in central Canada, and I didn’t find it
again until a year later, after the car’s battery died. The
VW’s battery was under the back seat, and when I pulled
out the seat to get at the battery, there was Dr. Bloodmoney,
JAMES P. BLAYLOCK,
one of the pioneers of
the steampunk genre, is
the author of more than
twenty-five books, most
recently the novel River’s
Edge and the novella
collection The Further
Adventures of Langdon
St. Ives, both published
by Subterranean Press.
Blaylock has taught literature
and writing since 1976
and was a recent winner
of the U.S. Presidential
Scholars Program Teacher
Recognition Award. He
teaches writing at Chapman
University in Orange,
California.A MEDITATION ON THE WRITER’S LIBRARYMy Life in Books
Life
THE LITERARY25 POETS & WRITERS^