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How I Stayed Sane While Moving Hundreds of Books
You think moving your books was hard? Try being a critic who reviews them for a living
A friend once asked, as he looked at all the books I planned to move from one apartment to another, “Do you have hernia insurance?”
He was joking, but I knew what he meant. I began earning my living a critic when, a few years out of school, I became book columnist for Glamour. Since then I’ve moved my library a half dozen times over distances ranging from two blocks to more than a thousand miles.
A vital lesson of those moves has been: You have to think outside the packing box. A reminder of it came last month when I had to move hundreds of books on alarmingly short notice.
The circumstances of the uprooting were as complex as they were painful. I’d lived for years in a subdivision of beach cottages on land whose owner died suddenly. His heirs lived overseas and had turned the management of the property over to American lawyers, who ordered all tenants of the cottages to move within 45 days or have their power shut off.
Finding a mover on short notice was the easy part. When you live in a small town in the Deep South, everybody has a truck. I posted a notice on Nextdoor, explaining that I’d need to move books and more…
