(Lengthy pause.) “Sure.”
“No.”
“But in your position, that is a risk.”
Star Trek – Rise of the Sith Part Two: Downfall of the Terminators – the Unrevengissening.
It is a truth
universally acknowledged that an author in want of books must explore strange
new worlds, seek out new life and new civilisations, and boldly place bookcases
where no bookcase has gone before.
And it is space…in the room…that truly is
the Final Frontier. This is what leads to the chant of no more dragons books. The cold reality is that there’s still room
for books…just no more bookcases – if I want to get in and out of rooms. And I
say that as someone who was once foolishly trapped behind a bookcase during an
event that was 50% laughable and 50% more laughable than that.
After
retiring a few bookcases before they fell apart and carpet-bombed my carpet
with volumes of volumes…
Then, and only then, did I struggle to add
bookcases: better bookcases that held more tomes than the retired bookcases
ever did. Within the last week I moved a bookcase ever-so-slightly, to make
things convenient for me. Inconveniently, I offloaded the entire unit, spread
the books around me on the floor in stacks, shifted the bookcase a touch, and
then laboriously placed everything back on the shelves.
That led to a question I was unable to
answer.
How
many bookcases do you have?
Many groupings of standing stones are known
for their uncountable properties. I feared this may be the same with the
bookcases dotting my literary landscape. Convinced there were eight bookcases
in this office, I was shocked to discover ten. For fear of generating a larger,
fresher, result…I must not count them again.
There couldn’t be more than ten in the greater
library across the hall. Well, perhaps a dozen. I wended my way through the
stacks, counting a loaded baker’s dozen of…eighteen. And that left another fourteen
in the lesser library. There are extra units that could hold books, though they
are dedicated to carrying arcane physical media playback devices: the revered
Blu-ray of myth and legend.
What’s the grand total? There are no
bookcases downstairs. I need space to move the shopping to the fridge, down
there.
It seems, then, that the answer to the
question is 42. This answer appears
in one of the books on a shelf in one of these rooms. I suspect Douglas Adams takes
up a very small section of three books somewhere in the main library across the
hall. He lounges there, insouciantly, I am convinced.
As I recall, if I misremember wrongly, I
bought the first three books in his autobiographical hitchhiking series. I
believe I borrowed book four, and was done with his work at that point. Now I
think about it, I may have had his detective-ish novel waved in my face. But I
don’t think I made it past the first page.
Good on ideas, slow to put them together,
Adams amused me with his joke. But his joke barely made it to the third book in
a trilogy, and should have remained a brief radio series in which we could hear
the ideas aloud without recourse to the cumbersome lumbering of many books,
plus any and all visuals in TV and film.
On further reflection, I might have
purchased book four in the trilogy. Something tells me I must cross the hall
and veer around the corner into the window-side of the main library, looking
for confirmation in paperback.
*
Interruptions are
rarely good. Obviously, I double-stack shelves when it comes to paperbacks. It’s
the only way to fly. The space is deep on the plank, and I plant a row of books
in front of another row of books in
the name of convenience. What did I go looking for? I went hunting for the
memory of a row of paperbacks…
As stated elsewhere, no matter the
paperbacks or hardbacks concerned, the arrangement of them stays more or less
the same down the centuries, aye, even if I move the books to a new bookcase.
This is as close as I get to possessing an index of the books on my shelves.
Once more, I caution the book-buying public.
Your life is too short to store books in alphabetical order. I’ll admit to
storing by author in order of publication when possible. (Exception: when order
of publication doesn’t match the order of reading.) On your life, and to aid
your sanity, place books where they will damn-well fit.
Alphabetisation has no place on my
bookshelves. There is a shelf for at least a dozen specialised dictionaries –
and those are alphabetical in nature. That’s it. For wider research purposes,
the internet cares not for the alphabet.
The internet has its own memory of almost everything,
and you can find almost anything by searching for an isolated word in any
language…or even an image that must, by law, paint a thousand words. But I did
not come here to praise Ibsen…I came to mutilate his quote about a thousand
words.
A strange sound interrupted me as I looked
for Douglas Adams in paperback form, and I gently threw a handful of books to
the carpet. Gently. But not Dirk Gently.
What caused this carpet-bombing? Another telephone rang. Wait. Mine?
Yes, my phone. Not my ringtone, though. I
recognised the general sound as a ringtone, and answered my phone on the
off-chance that my phone was the electrical device warbling a tune at me. The
most sophisticated electrical device active in the room up until that point was
a light, and though bulbs may hum…they don’t pull a song-and-dance act about
it.
If the bulb didn’t play a tune, then my
phone was the likely suspect. Unless someone broke into the greater library to
leave an incriminating telephone behind, then my phone was the culprit. Yes,
the bulb is on during the day to allow a degree of illumination that daylight
cannot provide in the meandering stacks.
After the call ended, I returned to my
office, secured my spare phone, and, naturally, called myself. The wailing cry
of a ringtone designed to wake the dead returned without explanation. No sound
of the feeble generic piece of electronica that interrupted my search of the
stacks…
And so. I researched phone glitches. One
solution was to phone yourself and make sure. Thanks for that. (A later phone
call from the world beyond the stacks confirmed that my regular ringtone was
resplendently revived.) Why did my ringtone change, ambushing me in the
library?
Doesn’t matter. Won’t happen again.
I returned to the library and found nothing
by way of Adams, Douglas. On Deep Thought,
I summoned the dim and distant memory of having sent the works of Douglas Adams
off to the charity shop. My bookcases are still my bookcases. I trust my phone
is still going to announce itself as my phone after a temporary glitch.
And if I count them all again, I should find
there are 42 book-holding machines on this floor. There’s a 43rd
book machine just to my left. It’s a Kindle. If I re-purchase all of these
physical books digitally, assuming they are available for sale…
(Yes, I own many an arcane tome that’s not
on the Mighty Amazon in the electronic format.)
First things first: even inexpensive
purchases mount up.
Second things second: at best, I’d take in a
bit of money from selling physical books. But that is a long laborious process.
Buying digitally is swift and painless until you see the ultimate price-tag.
Selling physical books by carting them into shops or boxing them up for the
mercies of the postal system…
Nope. Nothing painless to see there.
Leave aside the business of buying digitally
and selling physically. What would happen if I dispensed with analogue books? I
believe I’d be felling trees. One by one, bookcases no longer required… topple.
Disappear. With great effort in marshalling the empty frames downstairs and out
the door, yes, they’d go.
Once more, daylight floods into the rooms.
No. In the office, daylight would trickle in. It’s that kind of room. But you
get the idea. If I go digital and all the physical books vanish…imagine the
space.
But that can never happen. True to form, I’d
fill empty bookcases with other things. Hell, I am filling semi-empty bookcases
with other things right now. There are Dungeons
& Dragons books on my shelves by the mile. Shortly, I’ll have dungeons.
Meanwhile, I already have many bulky boxes of dragons.
Here’s the thing about a model. It has to be
there. Not digital. Actual. Physical. The larger boxes can fell a small horse
or even the most robust family pet. I used to think a bookcase might fail on me
as I walked by, and the cascade of hardbacks would serve as a fitting tomb.
Tomb by tome.
Now, though, it’s just as likely that an
unpronounceable dragon will swoop from its lofty lair and launch a sudden
strike at my vitals. It’s time to declare
no more books dragons. Okay…no more…after three of the beasties,
stuck in a warehouse at the world’s end, flutter in daintily to test the
strength of the floorboards sagging beneath me, that is.
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