Thoughts trickle
through filters and drip into cups. After I’d published my last blog post, I
thought over the knock-on effects from moving a bookcase sideways and
assembling a new chair. Initially, I didn’t think there were any snowball
effects.
Usually I have to move a thing, and I know that
greatly disturbs the landscape. Avalanche. Now I must shift that, alter this,
take that thing down, put that other thing up, count those, hammer that, apply
pliers to these…
This time, nothing much happened. Unscrew
those connectors. Shift that bookcase around. Assemble the chair. Done. It’s
easier to lean back and reach for items on the moved bookcase than it was to
twist and reach for things when the case faced me, strangely enough. Nothing
else? Well, no. Nothing else.
Except…
*
Memory takes a
strange battering when you make a major move. The bookcases change. And the
order of the monoliths in your own personal Bookhenge…the order goes to hell.
In an attempt to draw order out of the chaotic changes, I made things harder
for myself by preserving the order of books on new shelves.
A massive bookcase must travel from the left
side of a room to the right side of another room just to give me room to move
things around the first room. That bookcase is coming back to this room later. It’s
too big to move loaded. You have to unload those groaning shelves.
It’s worth repeating this. An author’s
library is a crazed beast bolted into shape by the demands of the books
themselves. Authors gather many tomes down the centuries. Even in the Digital
Age, that’s still true. I check my Kindle.
Of the 116 items on there, 44 are files of
mine in various stages of development. I used to throw files into the tappokita
machine and watch as the story sausages emerged from the flopperiser. I’d take
the results and load them on my Kindle to see the state of the fart.
Amazon ended support for those
highly-processed files. It’s now easier to drop the raw story ingot into the
online preview machine and check formatting issues that way.
What am I saying? It’s the Digital Age. I’m
a digital author. Yes, I’ve been loaded into Tron World by a powerful laser
more times than I care to remember. But even so, I don’t use the Kindle much. Almost
half the files on that Kindle are test files from days of yore. My books are,
mostly, made of paper. And that leads me back to the topic of physically bulky
books and physically bulky bookcases.
It should be easy to preserve the order of
books in an alphabetised room full of books, right?
Wrong.
An author’s library is a crazed beast bolted into shape by the demands of the
books themselves. Authors gather many tomes down the centuries. And authors do
not store those tomes alphabetically. Authors store those volumes by volume.
Size matters. Width, especially.
*
You can’t transport
books off shelves and onto tables and floors in a jumble and then rely on the
alphabet to help reconstruct the exact order once the furniture is finally as
you like it. No. You must create a space on the floor for the queue of books,
and line the bastards up like victims in a firing-squad. They must fall back
into place in a new part of the room – exactly as you laid them out. By the
combination of sizes that fits.
And, for the most part, laborious as this stacking
process clearly is, the book-moving and order-preserving engine works.
*
Until…
You move furniture around and create a tiny
new space that allows you to flip a whole bookcase around – opening up a vista
crammed with possibilities. And you cram it…with a new bookcase. This opens up
space in another room once you transfer a whole case from one side of the
building to another.
And that, in turn, opens up another vista
crammed with possibilities. So you cram it. With another new bookcase. And you
reorganise absolutely everything.
*
At that point, you
have space on bookshelves once more. Ah, the luxury. The only space that’s
cluttered now is in your mind. Why? The shelves are a uniform length, for you
purchase uniform bookcases.
That’s a trap.
You
remove a whole shelf of books. And you preserve them in order on the carpet.
It’ll be easier to move them to the new bookshelf. In that utterly new location,
protruding books won’t catch a wayward author with a quick one-two combination.
There’s extra space in that new locale.
Same width of bookshelf. Wider avenue to
walk down. Easier to move past, on the hunt for other tomes. You gather five
books at a time and pop them on the new shelf in the same order. When you reach
for the last three books they fit just exactly in there at the end. Job done.
Except…
Uncluttering your mind is the knock-on
effect of moving things around. The books are in the same order, based on
fitting the bastards onto that shelf. But they aren’t on that shelf. They aren’t
even in that room any longer. You wander rooms looking for the memory of a
place that almost exists. It’s still there, from left to right and back again
on that shelf. But you know it isn’t that shelf you are looking for, now.
Today, you look for a shelf that’s the width
of that shelf. When you find it, you’ll locate all those books, crammed in
where they are meant to be. Wherever that may be.
*
Though I don’t
believe that I have a good memory, I am told that I have a good memory. At
least, I remember being told that I have a good memory, an amazing memory, I’ve
got some memory on me…if I misremember correctly. And the difficulty is…
Remembering arrangements of shelves from the
last big organisation. That’s the problem. And recalling the one before that.
Also, the one before that. When I walk into these mini-libraries, I see them as
they are now, and yet, I remember shelf combinations from the dim and distant
past. This is especially annoying if I have to walk down an aisle looking for a
book.
Yes, it’s a crime to have bookcases
protruding into a room. They are meant to line the walls only. In the interests
of sanity, and in an insane quest to determine the load-bearing capacity of the
floor, I’ve sent bookcases sailing insanely out into the deeper waters of the
carpet.
Here be Sea Monsters.
Okay. It’s true. There are aisles. And I
positioned extra lights to guide me down those aisles, into the gloom. This is
the mad situation I find myself in, after a thousand years of bookery and
chapteronomy and page-itis. The office is rearranged. It’s now different. Yet
it’s strangely the same.
Layers of memories tell me where the books
are. And they just aren’t there. Except, of course, that they are there. Just
to the side. Or one shelf up. On the same bookcase in a different room. I’ve
cut down lending books out. If the books are far from the house for too long,
I’ll fill the gaps left behind. This is the way of things.
*
I thought about this
visible and invisible knock-on effect after I moved a bookcase sideways. There.
I won’t need to move anything again for a good long wh…
This blog post is really about moving a
second bookcase sideways within days of shifting the first one. I resisted. Ah,
but that resistance flew (low and at slow speed) in the face of the facts. For every bookcase moved, there is an equal
and opposite bookcase you must move.
I’d moved a bookcase located nearby and to
my right. The laws of physics demanded that I balance the universe in moving a
bookcase located far away and to my left. So the tale went. And I didn’t even
have to take pictures off the wall. That was an achievement.
Things are more organised to the left and to
the right of me. What changed? I tidied the usual spew of cables. Look at all
that new space to the left of…what do you mean I just filled it up instantly?!
Well, that’s never happened before. And the bookcases…
The order of books stayed preserved. I
didn’t unload any bookcases to get those jobs done. Winged it. No need to stack
anything on the floor. I stare at the books. If anything alphabetical is going
on there, it’s by accident. That small shelf: crammed. And the one below it:
crammed.
Strange alchemy fills the gap. I know I’ve
shuffled books around to fill the narrowing space. If I shift this one to
another room, I can fit these three new books in that space. The rule for the
top of a bookcase is different. Chunkiest tomes and boxed sets to the edge,
with no chance of falling over. Slim volumes in the middle of the stack.
Occasional support provided by bookends. Additional support from specialised
bookends. No, not the decorative kind. The practical kind should be renamed
bookmiddles when they sit halfway along the top of the bookcase. Can’t see the
term catching on, for, y’know, reasons.
I moved another piece of furniture. It
didn’t land on top of me. And now, this time, I won’t be moving bookcases for a
very long wh…
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