The Fourth Great Book Purge

I must take a moment and murmur a few words about The Fourth Great Book Purge.

The First Great Book Purge took place sometime around the turn of the millennium, when I winnowed by half thousands of volumes from my home library. Its less ruthless sequel took place in 2010, when we learned that we were moving away from Michigan and our real estate agent firmly suggested that I pack up my books and hide them if I expected anyone even to consider buying our house. Apparently the whole ‘learned former academic gone wild’ decor thing doesn’t play well in the Midwest.

The Third Great Book Purge took place two years ago, when all my books were still in storage and didn’t seem ever to be coming out, and I decided to get rid of all the volumes I’d already replaced with electronic editions. Writing about it afforded all my acquaintances the opportunity to assert I was a heathen and that nothing could replace the smell and feel of a real live book with real live pages made from real dead trees. I also had to withstand all manner of haughty statements about how electronic versions of books made literature as disposable and trivial as Wikipedia articles flickering upon the electron tube—which makes about as much sense as saying books are disposable and trivial because, like The National Enquirer or TV Guide, they’re printed on paper, but whatever. All I know is that I have over fifteen hundred books on my iPad and bitches, it doesn’t weigh any more than it did when I bought the damned thing.

I embarked on The Fourth Great Book Purge this month, when finally I got to unpack everything we’d hidden away in boxes four years ago. Of all the purges, it was probably the most ruthless. In the original book purge I was throwing away a lot of junk that I’d accumulated during grad school. It didn’t mean anything to toss a little-browsed volume on images of courtly love in The Canterbury Tales, simply because I hadn’t cracked the spine since ye olde medieval literature classes and I wasn’t likely to need it ever again. I love Robert Browning, but even a dozen years ago I could find his works online if I really had a hankering for them. What I got rid of back then was dross. The stuff that I still had mostly meant something. Getting rid of it was tougher.

But you know, even a lot of that could go. I didn’t mind letting go of the lesser novels of Fay Weldon, much as I love her style of writing; the really good stuff I already had electronically, and what was left didn’t reach her giddiest heights. I’ve always had a sentimental soft spot for the novels of E. H. Young, though for the life of me I couldn’t tell you the plots of any one of her novels, it’s been so long. Practicality won over sentiment, in that case. Ditto for the sunny country novels of Miss Read. When it’s possible to sum up the frantic buzz of activity in one of Miss Read’s slender two-hundred page novels as Gentle spinster schoolteacher bikes to her schoolhouse in a country village, helps a young lad with his sweater, then has tea and cakes with the vicar before going to bed, perhaps it’s just best to concede that the only reason I kept them around is that they were a favorite of my mother’s. And my mother isn’t around to read them.

I used to have a bookcase full of cookery books. I now have a single shelf. I used to have a very large bookcase dedicated solely to paperback novels; I had to lay them in four horizontal stacks across, three stacks deep on all five shelves to accommodate them all. That’d be sixty stacks of paperbacks alone, not counting the ones I crammed along the bookcase’s edges. I now have five little stacks of paperbacks that occupy two-thirds of a single shelf. In fact, every book I own fits in two bookcases, and the shelves are still so sparse that there’s plenty of room for artwork, picture frames, glass work, and baskets.

A casual visitor might inspect my shelves and walk away thinking that the only authors in whom I’m interested are Patrick Dennis and E. F. Benson, with minor flirtations with Ruth McKenney and John Dennis Fitzgerald. Maybe it’s true. The first three of those four are a big influence on my writing style, after all.

I have the books I want, though. If I accumulate a few more, I have space for them—which are words I haven’t always been able to say. If I shed some as they gradually come into public domain or as electronic versions are made . . . well, my iPad still won’t get any heavier.

(I should note that at no point did I get rid of any copies of my books. I probably have more author’s copies of my own novels than I have books by other people, at this point. They occupy their own shelves in the bedroom. I have a paranoid suspicion that they multiply like rabbits when I’m sleeping. I’m probably right, too—but let them breed, baby.)