the literary life MY LIFE IN BOOKSthat I’d be able to own only 50 percent
as many books as I might own other-
wise, and so my political motivation
collapsed under the weight of book
greed. I sent ten crates of the second
copies to the Palisade High School li-
brary in Colorado, where my cousin
Tom was teaching. That opened up
shelf space in my own library, thereby
creating a vacuum that immediately
began to fill with more books.
I’ll admit that I didn’t mention
this notion of storing books beneath
the floorboards to Viki, who might
have considered the idea peculiar.
Throughout our marriage she has
cheerfully abided by a nonaggression
pact concerning my books. She’s an in-
veterate reader herself, but she some-
times wonders how many thousands
of books a person needs. “O, reason
not the need,” I tell her, quoting King
Lear’s plea to his daughter Regan a
short while before he goes stark star-
ing mad. It’s true that there’s a faint
line between the bibliophile, who trea-
sures books for rational reasons—for
their monetary value or literary value,
say—and the bibliomaniac, a biblio-
phile who, as P. G. Wodehouse put it,
has gone off his chump.
A number of people over the years
have asked whether I’ve “read all those
books,” when they cast their eyes on
my library. To my mind that’s a little
like asking salt-and-pepper shaker
collectors whether they’ve filled their
eight hundred shakers with salt and
pepper. I answer the question by point-
ing out that I’m not dead yet, which
is factual but not altogether truthful
in what it implies. I have no intention
of reading all my books, although I
might tackle any one of them tomor-
row. In fact I tackled one today, Robert
Graves’s autobiography Goodbye to All
That, which I first read in 1976. It turns
out that it’s even better than I remem-
bered, although it’s possible that, as
C. S. Lewis wrote, “being now able to
put more in, of course I get more out.”
It’s true that rereading further reduces
the chance that I’ll read the rest of the
books in my library. If one is simply
trying to get through a shelf of books
as if eating one’s way through a loaf
of bread before it molds, the backward
step of rereading brings about a variety
of Zeno’s paradoxes.
In any event I thought I would read
all my books back when I bought
them. Some I’ve insisted I would read,
although it turns out that the more
insistent I become, the less likely I’ll
actually do so. Every summer I decide
to reread The Pickwick Papers, and I
make it about halfway through be-
fore the summer ends. I’ve taken to
bookmarking the best chapters and
rereading those, which compounds
the problem, because I never really
get anywhere, and yet I’m satisfied
with the result. And every decade or
so I decide to tackle the single-volume
collection of Thomas Mann’s Joseph
and His Brothers, a twelve-thousand-
page rat whacker. I admit that I’ve
failed. It turns out, alas, that I get
lazier with age, and recently I made
a firm decision to save the Joseph
quartet for deathbed reading, simply
for the fun of keeping the grim reaper
fidgeting in a bedside chair, picking
his teeth with his scythe while the
reading drags on. Like Charles II, I’d
apologize to him for taking an “un-
conscionable time a-dying.”
In the 1970s and early 1980s I
used to make regular runs into Long
Beach, California, with Tim Powers,
friend and fellow writer, to spend a
couple of hours wading through the
stacks at Bertrand Smith’s Acres of
Books, which allegedly held well
over a million volumes. It was impos-
sible to find any particular book, but
finding a book that you suddenly had
to own was inevitable. On one trip I
stumbled happily upon a signed copy
of the Collected Poems of Alfred Noyes
for fifteen dollars. That one emp-
tied my wallet, which was fairly thin
back then. Neither of us had much
money—ten bucks, say, maybe five—
but that would often score us a paper
shopping bag full of books. We’d tem-
per our spending to have a few bucks
left for a beer and sausage sandwich atJoe Jost’s, our favorite bar.
I was a fan of William Gerhardie’s
novels in those days and still am. Ger-
hardie was proclaimed a genius by H.
G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, and Vladi-
mir Nabokov, among other luminar-
ies. His star was at its zenith in the
1920s. After World War II, however,
his books became “unfashionable”
(the bane of writers), and he died in
obscurity. At Acres of Books I paid
two dollars for a copy of Gerhardie’s
Pending Heaven, inscribed “To Mad-
eline, New York, 1930.” I wonder
sometimes what happened to Made-
line. Did she value this copy of Pend-
ing Heaven as much as I do and keep
it on the shelf until she died, or did
she sell it when Gerhardie’s signature
was still worth something? How did
the book find its way to Long Beach?
Why the cheap two-dollar price for a
signed first American edition of the
book? Are all books destined to go out
of fashion?
If I had to run from a fire carry-
ing only ten books, my signed copy
of Pending Heaven would be among
them, although I can’t begin to justify
saying so: mere sentiment, nostalgia,
nuttiness. It’s entirely likely that who-
ever has to shovel my books into trash
bins after my death will not give the
book a second glance, or a first glance
for that matter, and it’ll go the way of
all flesh, taking a remnant of Mad-
eline (and me) along with it.
It was at Acres of Books that I
bought my first book published with
uncut pages. In the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, when
such books were popular, readers
needed a knife to cut open the pages
as they read, which is an adventurous
idea. The trendiest knives were often
dull, letter openers or butter knives
that would leave a particularly ragged
edge as if the book were made of hand-
made paper. In Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby, Jay Gatsby owns a library full
of uncut books, very elegant, mint-
condition volumes that had obviously
not been read. Students of literature
have remarked on this tirelessly since27 POETS & WRITERS^