Owning a Personal Library (1)

I’ve never thought of owning a personal library as a particularly original thing. I have a number of friends who also have a lot of books, but for the most part, when I mention my book collection, people look at me somewhat aghast. One or two people think that their collection of 50 or so books is quite a lot. When they hear of my over 4,300 they seem amazed. I am only amazed that I can get that many books into a one bedroom flat – so is my friend in the flat below, who expects to come home and find one day that she now lives in the sub-basement!

Having the opportunity to own a personal library is a great gift, and a privilege. I know that when I am gone it will all be dispersed, my siblings have libraries of varying degrees of their own. I don’t have any children. But knowing that I have books at my beck and call, whenever I want to reach for them is a joy. Knowing that half-way through one book – finding a reference to another – very often I can lift my hand and find that book and read the relevant passage in full, is a wonderful thing.

I often buy books when I know it will be years before I will read them. I’ve worked out that on average, a book not read in the first year of purchase is likely to sit winking at me for 12 years. I will buy anything that looks good relating to particular topics, and I continue to buy books by favourite authors and often stop reading them for long periods. Then start again with the latest volume, leaving half a dozen between the first I read and those I read now. A little glut of possibilities I can return to when I can’t wait for the next new offering.

Some evenings I wander round the room taking up books from this pile or off of that shelf (yes, there are piles, or teetering towers I have to own!). Sometimes they get moved to other piles. Or I make connections, or start pulling collections of related books together – is that a look of horror that they aren’t already in some kind of order? 

When I moved into my current flat 17 years ago, A-H fiction went on one particular set of shelves, but after that it became a bit of a free-for all, and since, I have added and added. Related books do tend to find themselves roughly in the same place. Every now and then when I think I want to read a particular topic or writer I shift one lot of books and re-locate them, and create what Anne Fadiman in her delightful collection of essays ‘Ex Libris’ calls an “odd shelf”. Shelves with books that tend towards a particular passion or obsession.

I generally know where almost all my books are, unless I’ve had a sort-out! So far I only have 2 missing volumes – ie books I have suddenly thought I wanted to put my hand on and .. er.. can’t!

I fantasise about my perfect library. The house that will hold my treasured collection in perfect style. I watch property-porn on the tv. Top of my criteria, were I to go house hunting with ‘Escape to the Country’ would be a fitting space for my books. I’ve seen one or two homes that would fit the bill. What is the perfect space? Well it wouldn’t necessarily be only one room. I would like much of the collection in one room, with a few nooks and crannies for various parts of the collection elsewhere. Poetry would always be housed in the bedroom. Why? Well I tend to think of poetry as being bound to the spirit and inner being, and I link that most with the experience of sleep and dreams, the unconscious and imagination.