Yes, this blog’s rallying cry is no more books. Bookdalf stands alone before the mighty Bookrog and tells it to go back to the shadow. Then books fall on him and he turns very pale. Tolkien was having storage problems at the time, and so a certain theme leaked into his work.
No more books. Or…
Very bluntly…
No more shelves to put more books on.
Ah, but I sneaked a bookshelf into the place
this week and found room for it under a table. It is now officially a hole for
storing a cubby in.
Apart from that last miracle (which I
performed twice, having two identical tables), there really isn’t room for more
shelves. And yet, even as I cry no more
books, more books arrive. Can’t turn them away, though I can read them and
formulate scathing reviews for the disappointing ones. I don’t bother writing
those down, of course.
This time around, I went chasing after books
of old. The Folio Society was once a society you joined if you wanted to buy
their books fresh from the book factory.
You joined by buying their books. Then
you could buy more. If you didn’t join, you could only really be gifted Folio
books, or wade through the depths of the multi-hand market.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that
the second-hand market has far more hands and fingerprints on your second-hand
book purchases than you thought possible, probable, or even just plain likely.
That is the multi-hand market. Make no
mistake there.
When I joined Folio, I had to meet the requirement
of purchasing four books. I was given a whole pile of free books for joining. Anyway,
I wanted five books. But my fifth choice was rejected on the basis that new
members might run off with an extra book without paying for it. Or something.
Well, I still received my great deal. Lots
of goodies. And the extra book I wanted…that was quickly gone. Sold out. Jump
forward to this month. I have space on a shelf for a few books. Why not try the
internet, and see if I can pick up Folio titles at reasonable rates?
I clicked, I saw, I purchased.
And I
altered the arrangement on my shelves. I may alter the arrangement some more.
The books were in reasonable condition. Any and all dents or dings to a
cardboard slipcase fall under the category of character.
I purchased the long-denied fifth volume.
Non-book items materialise on shelves next
to books. In some cases, random things appear in front of books. Certain deep
bookcases accommodate two rows of paperbacks per shelf. I’ve been arranging old
shelves rather than moving new bookcases into place…
What the hell does that mean? No more
bookcases. So? Tidy the hell out of what’s already there. A small amount of
junk accumulates. This is inevitable. Picture the scene. I am skilfully heaving
the Ark of the Covenant out of sight with one hand and balancing random objects
in the other.
When I spot a space on which to store
things, a space that is not the floor, I plonk random items in random places
that are not at floor-level. Either I quickly shove things onto shelves for
convenience or I drop those things on the floor.
Dropping something on the floor in the Ark’s
secret warehouse is never a good thing. More often than not, I save the day by
catching dropped items against my leg, wedged between my trousers and a bulky
shelf. The gradual rescue of the almost-dropped item begins.
How comedic is this slow-motion collapse?
Oh, it’s never funny at the time.
Very funny, after.
With nowhere to place new bookcases, I must
turn to desperate measures. Squeeze every last drop out of the shelves
available. Luckily, I employ a writer’s approach to the storage of books. Books
go where they fit. There is no such thing as alphabetical order in any of my
three libraries. We’re not counting the lost and forgotten vault next to the
stairs. Oh, it’s not alphabetical either. We’re just not counting it.
That’s a vault that was hard to get into position.
I think it’ll be harder to bring that bookcase back out without smashing a
light-fitting. But let us draw a veil upon that nonsensical hypothetical scene.
It doesn’t matter to me where the books fit
on my shelves. Only that they do. Or that they mostly do. Width of tome holds a
higher place in my priorities – not depth of travel into the alphabet. If an author’s
name or book’s title travels deep into the alphabet, that makes no difference
to me.
But if that author’s tome is a thin one,
why, it can go just there where no book is meant to reside. And yet, reside it
does – based solely on its slimness. Yes, height of author is also irrelevant.
Height of author’s book may be dealt with by means of moveable shelves.
You didn’t for a moment believe that I had
bookcases with fixed shelves, did you? Oh, there’s usually one fixed in the
middle of the case to provide stability. Scottish earthquakes are minor, if
even noted outside of seismic research stations, and so I fear little from the
trembling of the low hills.
For far too long, I slept under the sword
made by the Damocletian Cutlery Company. High above my sleeping head lurked
weighty murder-mystery books. Killed by
Dorothy L. Sayers isn’t a great way to go, though it makes for a witty
obituary.
This business of squeezing more books into
the same space set me thinking about an author’s output again. Occasionally,
you stop reading a series. It feels better to let a few years go by and then
purchase all the later books in one vicious swoop. That way, you avoid buying a
series that died a death one book beyond the point at which you paused
purchasing. You are warned off, and save yourself a bother.
But books there are, for stories there must
always be.
I developed a very short list of Folio books
to go after. Job done. The job is never done. That prompt from my very specific
Folio hunt, to return to authors I lost sight of in the mists, was merely one
facet of the unending job: running after books in general.
So now I have a short author-based list to
go after in paperback. Again, height of author is irrelevant. These lists don’t
stay short for long. I’m not meant to buy any more books. At all. Ever. Plus
one day.
Of the ten books that came into the house
over the past week, I’ve read seven before. And of the three unread, I’ve
experienced one as a TV adaptation.
I’m clearing other shelves of debris. Yes,
rarely, I throw junk out. There are plenty of shelves to absorb the book
collection on. This isn’t the problem. Setting up a video channel for
boardgames and roleplaying games meant unleashing an evil rampaging beast upon
the shelf-space.
The box
monster.
Boardgames (mostly) come in boxes. And they
come not as single spies but as battalions in galleons. My annual
book-purchasing forays are nothing next to the annual boardgame purchases. And
those purchases are bulky rather than numerous.
The ten books I’ve bought this month
represent almost all of the books I’ll buy this year. It’s likely that I’ll buy
several Folio titles in the autumn. And that should be it. Aiming for two dozen
books at most. Virtually all are hardbacks. I’m a fan of durability in a book.
About 50 per cent of this year’s crop of
books? Second-hand. I used to come out of bookshops with half a dozen
paperbacks at a minimum…and a week later there’d be half a dozen more in my
spacious holdall.
Time itself competes with my time. Space is
a factor. Changing tastes in reading. The weather. A particular brand of
coffee. All have their say when it comes to chasing down books.
Going into a bookshop is a science fiction
story all to itself, now. I haven’t been in a bookshop since the end of 2019.
Covid dropped a tombstone on that activity. My hauls were often more limited by
my bag capacity than the prices on the back pages.
If the bag is full, stop buying.
I bought no digital books this year. The
year is early. I confidently predict that my book
backlog…booklog…Balrog…anyway…I have books to read. They are easy to see on the
shelves, and remind me of their unread status. Digital books sit in a digital
drawer somewhere, and are easily forgotten.
And so…I confidently predict that I won’t be
buying digital books throughout the remaining chunk of the old annual sun-cycle
round-trip.
What is it, though, about chasing after
books? I sat here earlier, tape in hand, trying to calculate how to slip one
final bookcase into this room, to accommodate inefficient text-storing devices
in the rectangular style.
Digital books are efficient when it comes to
space taken up.
Paperbacks are leaves yellowing in the
storm. They crack, they crumble, they disintegrate…
What is it about hardback books? Hardbacks
are more durable than are the shaky paperbacks. It’s the durability. The hardbook
provides its own table when you sit there reading it in bed. That wins the
race.
*
But wait a bit. What is this
madness? I’ve derailed my own blog post on chasing after books, mostly in
series, in chronicling the problem of running a boardgame video channel. Time
to catch up on this character, or that author. With le Carré’s death fading into
the distance, I should really grab the last few unread tomes.
Not The
Naïve and Sentimental Lover, obviously. Life is, to quote an ancient
Chinese saying, too short for that shit.
I had my tape to hand, as I’d written. Then
it occurred to me, dimly, that I could move two small bookcases from another
place to this location. There’s a gap down the side of the bed that is the
width of a bookcase. Sheer coincidence, Jeeves. But we’ll take it.
Join us for Tetris, live. With books. The whole thing snowballed. If I moved
that small bookcase from near the library’s door, I could also move the other
small bookcase out.
And
then I could move the tall bookcase to the door area…as the tall bookcase was
VITALLY the same width as the bookcase being removed. I don’t have to squeeze
past. That’s the important part.
Doesn’t matter which bookcase stands there,
I have room to walk by.
If I could shift the tall bookcase from the
far corner of the library, I could consolidate books by adding rows of them to
the tops of bookcases. Just redistribute a few bookends. Make use of a tall
unit next to a small bookcase and you save yourself a bookend that can be
employed elsewhere. Just lean the books against the tall unit on the small
bookcase’s top.
The whole bookend business snowballed, too.
With all of these bookcases being shuffled
around, I could turn a chair.
Believe me when I say turning that chair was
like turning the tide of battle and altering the course of a war and the peace
generated after it. If I could turn the chair, I’d be able to shuffle bookcases
behind it and then make room to shift a narrow bookcase around…
And then. With much measurement. Taking into
account awkward cabling emerging from the floor…
Then. Bookdalf the White would ride in and
make a grand declaration, or something.
With all of these bookshelves swirling
around, controlled by Mickey Mouse, there might just be room to do a thing. And
that thing would be…to construct a storage unit in place and relieve the
volcanic pressure upon the various libraries.
Sometimes I wonder about the load those
floorboards can handle. But I don’t wonder for long.
It wasn’t enough to install a new storage
unit. No. It pretty much had to be built where it stood. And that turning aside
of one critical bookcase made all the difference. So. I built a Kallax. This is
a standard storage unit in the boardgaming world. It is the golden thread that
runs through the tapestry of YouTube videos about boardgames. Not my videos,
obviously. My cameras focus on the table. In other videos…
Yes, it is a cliché. Beyond cliché. Gamer
seated at table. Behind gamer? Loads of game boxes in a storage frame. That
cubed frame is the Kallax, from Ikea. It has no back to it. You could turn one
sideways midway down a room as a divider.
If you are lucky, you’ll fit four to five
large game boxes inside a cube. That’s at least fifty games to a unit, hell,
yes, even the chunky ones in large boxes. I had three centimetres to spare when
it came to fitting the four-by-four cube frame into the barely-available space.
Games
came off shelves and out of hard-to-reach spaces. They went to the Kallax,
willingly. What’s the upshot? I see the games more easily. They are fiddly to
remove, true. But. My bookcases have all that shelf-space recycled. Without a
back to it, the Kallax is shakier than a bookcase is. But without a back to it,
I can pop a boxed game out from the other side.
Never thought I’d have a Kallax. Space being
the main issue. I have conjured space out of nothingness. It took the better
part of a week, on and off, to turn a chair so that I might move a vital
bookcase out of the way of the incoming storage unit. And then, only after I’d
filled a gap down the side of a bed.
It’s a problem I thought about all month.
There must be a way. And there was no way. But. If I am to chase after books, I
must deal with the boardgame problem.
Well, after much coffee, the solution presented itself. Shuffle everything
along. Just one last time.
This eased another difficulty. For boardgame
videos, I use neoprene mats for a bit of visual interest on the black cloth.
These are stored flat, high, on an improvised storage level. I need a
stepladder to reach the mats. This is annoying.
But now I have the Kallax. And I can sit
these mats flat on top of the Kallax. Oh, I’ll still use the stepladder area for
other things. Things that are easy to manipulate. Neoprene playmates require
wrangling. Never wrangle anything while on a stepladder.
The place is safer, now. My boardgame studio
is revamped. It has a library attached to it. The library across the way is
pretty much unchanged. It’s the third library that is now barely a library at
all. For books, that is. That place has turned into a boardgame library.
And THAT major change gave me loads of space
for books. I can chase after books without let or hindrance. Plug gaps in the
collection. The list may be short, but the hunt is long. At least there is real
space, once more. Or the illusion of it, at any rate.
*
Of course there’s a
follow-up. I’ve now moved a small table. And that act set off the whole
avalanche all over again. The improvised storage level moved rooms. It is
easier to access, and uncovered the tops of three large bookcases. I have more
room in the library for books on high. And in the game library, there’s much
less fuss in storing a few of the larger neoprene mats there. Alongside maps.
Many maps and mats. Maps and Mats was
a roleplaying game from 2015. It had a devoted following, though not that many
products. Maps, mostly. And that…is a roleplaying fact.
It
isn’t. I make that shit up for my gaming videos, which I hope to return to
making soon. There was the small matter of turning the video studio sideways. I
think that was the eighth labour of Herakles…
No comments:
Post a Comment