AUTUMN BOOK LEAVES: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

 No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
   As I have seen in one autumnal face.

John Donne writes of people as though they are the seasons. But we can take those two lines from his ninth elegy and just think of them as the seasons themselves. Yes, I’ve reduced his work’s symbolism to the mere observation of changes in the weather.
   Donne has been on my mind of late, as I plan to quote him again, as well as paraphrase him, in a far-off video production. Its time will come soon enough. I am steeped in autumn, and in delays – autumnal and otherwise – leading to the late delivery of this blog post.
   The Hound of the Baskervilles ate my homework. Honest, guv’nor. For two weeks, I haven’t caught a break when firing up the blog machine. If I had the time, hell, I didn’t have the topic. And I never had the topic. Having no time didn’t seem to matter, in the end.
   Summer’s perpetual high pressure area over the Atlantic is barely a memory. If it rained, I blinked and missed that way back when. August threatened another uncharacteristic long spell of heat, but the threat proved empty. September performed according to ancient custom, and rained like a bastard.
   Going by the opinions of the eighth Henry’s wives, he reigned like a bastard. October has settled back into familiar Mordor Mode™. And I’ve enjoyed the wind and rain tapping at and rattling around the house.
   Pre-winter repairs and maintenance kept me away from the keyboard when it mattered most. Typing 1,500 words or more for this blog. Too great a task for me. Send for Herakles. Then I was almost trapped in the stacks again. I’d lost an entire shelf of books.
   Not a bookcase. But one shelf. I wandered low and high, about and around, to some avail. As much as possible, I preserve books in order. If the bookcase falls into disrepair and must go, then, yes, it goes. But the books relocate, intact, and all is right with one small cranny there in the library.
   True, I no longer have a unified library. My books have spread across three rooms into slightly different libraries. Here is the office library. Across the landing there’s the old library. It houses more books than the new library sitting next to it.
   I’ve taken on a few portable bookcases. They sit, comfortably, on the landing itself. This was forbidden by law. Until I finally ran out of space. I spent too long looking for these missing books. Fallen leaves.
   How autumnal.
   I wandered the three libraries and I wandered them again. The second time I dropped a reminder to me, myself, and I: look up. So I looked up and found that these books, which once rested at eye-level, definitely weren’t any higher than that. Nice try, though.
   Then I dimly recalled there was a U-turn I could make: all the way to the end of the new library, and around into the deadest of dead-ends. There, I might find a half-bookcase sheltering the missing items.
   But no. What did I find? Nothing. And I was surprised to find nothing on the bottom shelf of the half-bookcase there. It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author in search of space for books always begins by filling the bottom shelf of a bookcase. The heaviest books must live nearest the floor. Only flimsy paperbacks, spry, and airy, make it to the top of the tallest bookcase peaks.
   If nothing else, I discovered more space. An empty shelf. Against all the laws of storage, the bottom shelf housed no books at all. I’m sure there was a reason for the arrangement…just as I am certain I haven’t a fucking clue what that arrangement was.
   With the addition of portable library carts, my libraries are now all complete as far as storage is concerned. At this point, I cannot add fixed bookcases anywhere. I may only send the older, more venerable, storage units into genteel retirement. Then I bring in the replacements. There is nothing genteel in watching a broken bookcase face pulverisation as it is taken away to the dump. The sound is something shocking, also.
   That’s it. I’m done. The floor is exhausted. I can reorganise book storage on the shelves. Remove the dead wood and measure like hell to fill a vacated space. But only a vacated space. I’m permitted to shuffle the deck-chairs at an ever-increasing angle on this sinking ocean liner. Nothing completely new. Not to house books in. Unless…on wheels. And I quickly exhausted that last desperate ploy.
   My quest for books reminded me books almost always only come into the house. Few leave. If a book disintegrates and I can find a replacement, okay, then I’ll make the arrangements. Hardly any books fall apart. Occasionally, I’ll take a wild notion and realise some books have to go. And to charity they are sent.
   Yes, I had a few books by an author whose work would never interest me these days. And, yes, I sent those to the recycling bin. I refused to clog up charity shops with them. This is a rare state of affairs for me. With all of that in mind, where the fuck did an entire shelf of books vanish to? Books have leaves, it is true. But they don’t fall off bookshelves in the autumn.
   I hunted low and high. Then, realising what I was looking for and where, I returned here. To the office library. And I looked in a place that was once dangerous. For there I trapped myself in my library when moving a bookcase in…not to go all Dickensian…a most injudicious and highly inappropriate manner.
   And, in a wildly different way, I almost trapped myself in the same place all over again. What the fuck is this? The Bermuda Fucking Triangle of Books? Where books and authors go to disappear? It’s been a disappearing month. Long. Memorable. Eternal. And yet blink in the eye of a gone.
   All I have is this dog-ate-my-homework blog. The usual I’ll-fill-the-blank-space ploy of filling the blank space with the phrase I’ll fill the blank space, and I’ll hope no one notices the unconscionable levels of shameless padding involved in generating unconscionable levels of shameless padding.
   I found the missing shelf. Low down, on the floor. And I struggled not to be trapped in my own library all over again. This should be harder, now. The first time involved the moving of a bookcase. But, portable book storage aside, I won’t face the prospect of moving a bookcase again until another one bites the dust and I call up the glue factory to take delivery of its shattered spine.
   My mismanagement of the situation was legendary. There I was, not even moving a bookcase, and I nearly trapped myself between a hard place and a hard place. No rocks were harmed in the making of this anecdote.
   When you store books where they fit…
   And when you preserve the books when the bookshelf falls to bits, even moving the books to another room…
   When there’s risk to life and limb deep in the stacks…
   You know your library has developed quirks capable of ending you. And you accept the truth. The truth is…even had I stored these books in alphabetical order and by author and genre…yay, even unto the last letter of the alphabet…I’d still misplace whole shelves anyway. And I’d still risk being trapped inside the stacks.
   But there’s a cold view preserving what little sanity remains. I could never store a library alphabetically. Doing so would force the books to take up more space. In the name of efficiency, the books are crammed into every corner – real and imagined.
   To stack the books alphabetically, I’d need another two libraries bolted to the building’s outside walls. Possibly the rooftop. And books are no friends to rain, just as rain is no friend to books.
   Luckily, I’ve cut down on book purchases this year. I’m sure I still bought plenty, on reflection, but I cut back. For reasons of space, yes. I could have so many books here in digital format.
   Books on shelves possess more than a huge chunk of the room. They offer a physical presence acting as a reminder to read them. I never have that weight to my reading choices when they are digital. There’s no heft to an electronic file.
   I go back to that conversation in a bookshop, with the American woman who sold me some volumes. We agreed that physical books would never truly be replaced. In the nightmarish future dystopia of five minutes from now, books will be boutique products in gentrified streets, sold to niche customers at absurd prices measured in kidneys.
   Fuck off when it comes to the idea of writing stories by manual typewriter. That notion can die in a fire. If I occupy a Venn diagram, it’s a barely-visible dot. I type at the computer keyboard. My stories are digital. But I read physical books. And I divide those books into paperbacks for cheapness and hardbacks for durability.
   I demand an index for all non-fiction books, but the books in my bookcases could never be sorted alphabetically: only by the memory of how I stored those volumes initially. Memory of which books sit next to each other is all I have to go on, when the original bookcases disappeared around the back of the barn so long ago, to the sound of a shotgun blast, and with the sight of autumn’s crows scattering to the darkening horizon.