129: I Got Rid Of All My Books (11 Years Ago...)

Back to Bach next week! In the meantime, I thought you’d appreciate a story I wrote after I ‘discarded’ the majority of my possessions— mostly books. Whereas I easily tossed things like clothes, artwork, komono, plates, pens, et cetera, getting rid of my massive library took months and was an emotional rollercoaster. I haven’t ever looked back! …mostly.

Sans Eyes, Sans Books, Sans Everything

If you go home with somebody and they don’t have any books, don’t f*** ‘em!-Not so old aphorism

Last scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion;Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.-As You Like It, 2:7

-for Marie Kondo (and Rachel)

At eighteen years old, I moved to New York City with five books: a Mozart biography, a Bach biography, a Beethoven biography, a book about Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and a Bible. My sheet music library (which was already massive) and any other books (which were insubstantial) I left with my parents. All I valued at that time was playing the piano and any reading dealing with that. After a year, my personal Pentateuch had grown four times in size, but was humble still.

Eleven years later I had one-thousand nine hundred and thirty two books.

Books bought, books found, books stolen, books given, books I printed: any way one could get a book, I got books. I dreamed of creating a library that resembled my teacher Lowenthal’s: wall to wall books, books falling out of books, books used as bookshelves themselves, pages on the ground from who knows which books, books with missing covers, covers with missing books, books rapidly-read-horizontally-stacked-under-coffee-cups books, books under-the-piano-to-muffle-the sound books, books piled-on-top-of-the-piano-to-complete-a-cliche books, the divine image of the godhead seen in books spinning endlessly out from the library walls.

“I always imagined heaven to be a kind of library.”

That was the first sentence by Borges I ever read, and Lowenthal’s study was the closest to paradise I had been.

—

I lived in seven different apartments in New York, and with each move at least 75% of the boxes were books, and with books come their doomed counterparts: bookcases (so help us god.) Many a reader may commiserate. Once the first small white case was filled, (Ikea, 2007) there needed to be a match (Ikea, 2008.) By 2009, I had two crumbling, completely useless, bookcases.

I called the poet Ron Price, who, though he owned less books than Lowenthal, seemed to have given more thought to their casing. I discussed a sleek white Ikea bookshelf I had seen online:

“Oh! Don’t buy a f***ing BILLY!” he shouted.

He knew the make. …Everybody knew the make. Little did I know, the crumbling pieces of piecemeal that already housed my books bore the same name.

“Buy some nice wood. Make some sturdy shelves.”“Hmm… You’ve been down this road it seems.”He chuckled.“The… shelves are even more important than the books?” I went so far as suggesting“I don’t know about that.” he muttered.

In a month, I had, at only a few times the cost of escaping Billy’s curse, three black bookcases, two inches thick per shelf. Unbendable.

My East Harlem studio was immensely stylish: I dreamed I would see reconstructions of it in museums as I had seen reconstructions of Proust’s bedroom. Two tall cases stood side by side, and a third half-case, tastefully empty, was stacked horizontally on the other two. It created one giant fifteen foot wide wall, ten feet tall. It was like a tree for inanimate objects.

And then, many a reader may commiserate, I tasted the rainbow: a design magazine with a bookshelf arranged by color. I didn’t do anything else for two weeks.

I spent every day agonizing over the color of books and where on the new color coordinated shelves they would go. I grouped by color, but then realized my groupings were random. I needed the spectrum: a clean sweep from infrared to ultraviolet. I needed a circle? No, but, this was disastrous. Is color a circle? No, color is a triangle, right? The primary colors are only three… After two months of switching books around, I hit upon the solution: Primary colors would outline a triangle marking the top and the lowest corners. Then, the secondary colors would form the inverted triangle pointed at the bottom. It was so obvious. The only choice then was which of the primary colors to put at the top. In my collection, it made sense that blue should be the crown. Hence: orange went to the bottom, green and purple at the shoulders, therefore yellow and red at the... damn! That looks amazing!

But what of all these books without color? Whereas I had previously banished them to the edges, now the black and white spines fit brilliantly into the middle. A zero in the middle of all the brilliance. Quickly, no matter how beloved the content, brown, tan, and off-white, gray books, these were imposters. I stuffed them here or there where they wouldn’t stick out. Eventually I put them with the dishes: behind the cabinets. The bookshelf, now made of only resplendent spines, became a centerpiece. It had eye gravity. It never escaped comments from guests.

Any difficulties one might imagine, like two different colors on a spine, for example, were surprisingly rare. And when they did occur, each book somehow fit into only one section. There was one book though, (three novels by DH Lawrence) that had an obtuse, subtle, yet obvious, but odorous! an obnoxious color. It could not be placed: was it pinkish orange, bluish pink…? I know of nothing in the universe colored the same. I tried him in the reds, in the near pinks, in the center of the oranges, on the fringes of the oranges, with the near yellows, no luck. I banished him to the basement.

“Look at all these orange books!” That’s what most people said after being sucked into the shelf for some time. (Penguin fiction, bottom center.) Schirmer sheet music publishes in bright yellow, which held down a sunny corner, whereas Henle publishes in matte blue. Dover —many a musician has cringed— seems to publish only in the most carefully selected distasteful colors, but when searching for the perfect transition from reddish-orange to orangish-red, Dover somehow prints an accurate Pantone 17-1464.

Now, perhaps you reading will join in with the main criticism, which was, “how can you find anything now?!” But this was ridiculous, I knew all my books of course: the color of every spine, the height, width, the feel, the smell… besides, I had actually read most of these! (That oh-so-memorable moment my illiterate aunt visited and accused me of ‘collecting them,’ that there was no way a person could read so many books.)

Rachel would quiz me:“Ancient China?”“In the off green.”“Nonsense of Edward Lear?”“Is dark red.”“Baghavad Gita?”“Purple!”

Never could she stump me. She started switching books to see if I would notice. At first she tried the obvious: swapping a blue with a yellow, as if to test if I so much as glanced toward the shelf once a day. Then, sneakily, she tried switching a dark red with an off red. Finally she took to inverting certain books, but I noticed every time.

—

This was short-lived. Maybe only half a year before the shelf was condemned. It actually did get photographed in a (now defunct) design magazine. I felt like I had achieved something great when that happened— but it was April 2015, and we collectors know what happened then:

Marie Kondo burst on the scene. God save our recycle bins.

One excerpt from her book— a book about organizing, mind you, not a book about the human spirit, not a book of poems, not a book about love or anything of the sort: a book about organizing, left me in tears. What was wrong with me?

And so began the days of getting rid of all my books. Poignant Pentateuch to boastful nineteen-hundred, however many it had been, it was all doomed to die now.

Obviously enough, all of the books with the dishes were sold. If they were there, what was their use? Those that gave me a hard time in the color wheel were q…

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