Book-Storage Chic
I moved a year ago this weekend so I could avoid living out (or more accurately, dying from) a childhood nightmare.
The first time I had my terrible waking dream, I was in the 4th grade. That evening, was just like most of the other nights that year: I laid in bed, jiggling my leg to stay awake while my parents slept through News Channel 4’s nightly broadcast, woke when the Tonight Show’s brass band intro started, kicked their leather reclining rockers shut and stood up, sighing. I listened to the water running while they brushed their teeth. As soon as I heard their snoring start, I slid out from under my eyelet bedspread, careful not to disturb my sibling Ruth, asleep in the twin bed next to mine.
I tiptoed to the adjoining bathroom and slid the pocket door closed, pushing up slightly to keep the wheels from squeaking on the brass rails. Only then did I turn on a light. I pulled my well-read copy of Anne of Green Gables from its hiding spot beside the laundry hamper and curled on the rose shag bathmat, my chin resting on my knees.
“One day, I’ll have a house full of books,” I whispered. “No! A house built of books!”
And in my dream house, I would read all night, no risk of any parents telling me to go to bed and no Ruthie to complain about my reading light. I could see myself sitting crosslegged in the middle of a room lined by stacked hardbacks. They would arch into a multi-colored, cantilevered ceiling. Anne would be the keystone.
Then I saw myself lean back against a stack. It swayed. It shifted. It toppled. The weight of my house of books came down on my head, Anne landed last, impaled by my fractured and protruding breastbone.
The vision became my most vivid, realistic and lasting nightmare. If you’d visited my last apartment, a one-bedroom in Nashville, you might have thought I wanted the vision to come true. On the left side of my writing desk, a nine-shelf metal bookcase was bolted into the wall, security deposit be damned. I had found it while living in Western Massachusetts. I drove my blue PT Cruiser across the snowy Berkshires to the edge of New York state to buy it off of a former school superintendent, then I stripped off its rust and most of its red and yellow paint. Bare, it became a trendy pure vintage industrial piece, but no one sees that because it is loaded full of my American history collection.
Behind my back was a coffee table I had constructed of six natural-wood wine boxes I bought off a local sommelier for seven bucks. I flipped two of the boxes to face the ceiling, giving me room to store a miniature copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets bound in a Burgundy fabric hardcover, a rusted cornice off an iron fence, an engraved brass box that caught my fancy and a set of matryoshka dolls cradling posies that my sister brought me from Russia. A glass top protects them from dust. The real purpose of the table, however, is to hold my collections of public history and historical journals, stuffed and piled into the other four boxes that I turned longways and nailed into a wheeled plywood base.
Fiction went on a black wood seven-foot bookcase I installed against the far wall. Those shelves are deep enough that I could store two rows of books on them, but I once promised my mother I would never go so deep into this obsession. That means I’ve room for a few tchotchkes. It’s the only way I’ll ever show off my collections; photographs, mementoes and artwork are a waste of good shelf space. I’ve three favorites: a sepia-toned photo of a wizened labor protestor holding a sign reading “Your tax dollars at work,” my grandparents’ wedding portrait and a Rosie the Riveter action figure (with working spring-action rivet gun) that I won in a round of Dirty Santa.
That left just enough floor space left for a desk and a loveseat. I thought it was a successful living room, though it didn’t look like any design column I’ve seen. I coined a new label for my style: “book storage chic.” But every morning at 9, a nearby construction company blasted away a chunk of the limestone bedrock, making every book in my apartment rattle. I watched Anne shake and worried about my future.
I decided it was time to move to a place with an extra bedroom I could turn into an office. I wanted a shot at surviving the coming book apocalypse. I’ve bought two more of those metal library bookshelves, which means I’ve been able to unpack my non-historical nonfiction as well as my theology books. For the first time in years, my entire library is unboxed.
Perhaps you will suggest I Kondo my way free. Or, given my Swedish ancestry and my recurring nightmare, döstädning — death cleaning — maybe a more appropriate method. Old books should be the easiest thing to purge, right? How often do I reread them? Can’t I find another copy in a library? And aren’t e-books the salvation of every overloaded apartment?
My relationship to my books is not so simple. Books are my friends, teachers and journals. I fill most of them with notes, transcribing my thoughts as I read so I can revisit them later. I use margins to fight with the authors’ ideas or jot down connections to other things I’ve read, especially if the book is relevant to my research.
Because of my marginalia, I have two books that no one may borrow, and I’ve added oversized bookmarks to them proclaiming “DO NOT LEND.” One of the uncirculated books is Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. I read it one Christmas break, and I filled its pages with my rage. The other book no one may touch is Leslie J. Reagan’s When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Law and Medicine in the United States, 1867–1973. I first read it in the fall of 2003, just 15 months after finishing a biblical literature degree at a conservative Christian university. Reagan’s stories about women’s lack of proper health care troubled me and challenged my politics. I read it again three-and-a-half years later, and in my notes, I mercilessly mocked the person I had been at the start of my graduate school career. During the third reading, I scolded both of my former selves for their intolerance. Now it sits on my shelf, a record of the many people I’ve been in the past twenty years.
Any other book is available for let, if you give me sufficient collateral. But if you come to visit, please don’t buy me any more books, at least not until I find space in my new apartment for another shelf.
