marrying libraries
Even though I have said in a previous post that I’m getting so large I can hardly do anything anymore, believe you me I’m doing things.
You might well recall our timeline since the beginning of the year:
December: engaged
January: begin planning wedding, go to doctor’s appointments
February-March: the Mr. moves in, continue planning wedding
March: get married
End of April: the stepdaughter moves in
End of June: the stepdaughter moves out
So … not only did we combine households, we had to clear out a room for the stepdaughter. The room that was my spare, catch-all-store-my crap room. Needless to say, we have a lot of stuff in the storage area. The Mr. is the storage area keeper, I just make boxes for him to bring there, so I don’t even know how much is there (nor do I really want to know, frankly).
So now it is mid-July, and I have the second room back, preparing it for baby. One thing we didn’t do before the stepdaughter moved in was weed books. I’m a reader, and the Mr. is also a reader. We like to buy books — although we do much less of that lately with the new frugality.
There was a large bookshelf in the second room of books that had to go. However, I didn’t want to just put them in storage because they were all MY books. The Mr’s books were in the living room and the bedroom! Over the last three weekends, I’ve taken the task of integrating our books and putting five more boxes of them in storage, who knows when we’ll see them again.
The final result is that they are now all interfiled. My Jane Austen next to his Samuel Beckett. My “Theodore Rex” next to his “The Origins of the Inquisition”. The Mr. has become amazingly relaxed about what is kept and what is not — mostly he just says I can make any decision I like about the books, it will be fine. He joked with his brother about how he can’t really picture himself getting angry about not having immediate access to the Memoirs of Elias Cannetti (he tends to like the obscure) or not being able to refer to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. I imagine he’ll get by without them. I mostly saved things of his that I thought I would like to read someday, and discard things of mine that I was tired of.
The title of this post is from an essay in Anne Fadiman’s book, “Ex Libris” called “Marrying Libraries”, which I highly recommend reading. She is bookish, and so is her husband, and it took them ten years to finally intermingle their books into one shelf, as it were. It was a heartwrenching process, deciding on whose copy of Shakespeare to keep, and how to arrange. We didn’t really have the luxury to wait that long.
Posted by on July 20th, 2008 under Uncategorized
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- tomato sandwiches
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