Repatriating the Library

We have a custom in our house. We don't drive anywhere the Friday of the Memorial Day weekend.  And we don't drive anywhere the Monday of the Memorial Day weekend.  But we do go places on the weekend itself.  Which works out very nicely, because the highways tend to be nice and empty then. As do the museums and the theaters...please, keep it under your hat.

This year, of course, we are moving, and so the drive was more utilitarian in nature than is the norm.  Yesterday we discovered that the new car (What new car? The one with the four-wheel drive that you need outside of the city, when you can no longer simply leave the family car frozen into its parking space for three weeks and take the subway everywhere) will haul 16 Fresh Direct cartons filled with books (my building's porter has been exceedingly gracious about re-purposing those cartons to our doorstep).

Before I could fill those cartons, I had to get my son and my husband to help me pick up the enormous      L-shaped leather sofa and move it two feet forward into the center of the room.  Four years ago we had moved into this apartment (which is large, by NYC standards) from a still larger (and still pricier) one 16 blocks south.  In a mere four years, this apartment's rent has caught up in sheer loony ridiculousness to the rent we had decided then that no reasonable human being should be willing to pay. This place is smaller by two rooms, and the neighborhood, while Very Good Upper West, is not Prime Upper West.  Time to go!

But the reason I bring this up is that, for the last four years, 12 solid shelves of books have been hidden behind the back of the sofa, stacked on their backs with their tails facing out (did you know that, in bookbinder parlance, a book has a head and a tail, in addition to a spine?  I'm not making this up).  I have not seen their honest faces for four long years.  In that time, they have waited patiently, and I have missed them more than you might imagine.  I have also had those horrible moments of wondering whether a cherished book was purged in a moment of Moving Madness, sacrificed to the chanted invocations of my husband, the High Priest of Spartan Living:

"Clutter and junk! Clutter and junk!  Can't we get rid of some of that clutter and junk?"

It turned out that more books had survived his frantic pleas than I'd feared, although I can't imagine what could have possessed me to sacrifice all but the first volume of the Bloom County series.  I mean, that makes no sense. Thank heavens I had the wit (and sneakiness) to smuggle in the collected works of Edward Gorey, Gahan Wilson, and Bill Watterson! Not to mention Chas. Addams (in hardcover, yet.)

It's remarkable what you find you have forgotten you own, in terms of books, when circumstances have forced you to stash them in some un-get-at-able place for a while.  I kept on emitting little coos of welcome and delight as I lovingly dusted them off, patting them gently on their little heads, and promising that from now on, each one was going to have a lovely accessible shelf space all to themselves because we had bought a big house just for them!

So out they came - all the books I'd thought I could (under direst necessity) live without.  I found out I had a rather nice collection of books on Fabergé, and that at some point I seem to have wanted to own every book on the Romanovs (and, in particular, the Anastasia claimants) that I could get my hands on.  Ditto  Sarah Bernhardt.  I had a bunch of those Wishful Thinking cookbooks that you only have because the pictures and the descriptions are so mind-blowingly yummy that you convince yourself you're actually going to cook all those things one day. The Russian Tearoom Cookbook fell nicely into both the Food Porn and Imperial Russia obsessions, so that was a find.

Then there were the books I'd read to my son when he was little enough to be read to, and of course at that point I was practically dancing with glee and nostalgia.  The standards like The Very Hungry Caterpillar (mine is signed by Eric Carle) were nice, but what really had me clapping my hands was all the out-of-print arcana that I knew my son was going to be saying things like, "Hey, Ma...whatever happened to that book about the old lady who wanted to adopt every kind of animal in the world, except an elephant?" about if he ever had any kids of his own.

Up they went yesterday, all sixteen boxes -and today I got down to cases again and started in on the Visible Books.  I packed diligently for two hours - and, having once owned a used bookstore, I am an excellent book packer and waste not an inch of space - while my husband played chess on his laptop and sighed about what a headache moving is. (He did promise to help with the kitchen packing, and since I don't want to keep hearing him ask me whether I actually need all these books, I was happy with the deal.)

Today's load of the next sixteen boxes was comprised of all the Visible Books; I even made inroads on the Fancy Glass Door Bookcases, which is where I keep the Incredibly Impressive Stuff that is meant to let you know that I am Very Smart and don't just spend all my time re-reading Forever Amber.

So James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov were forced from their cozy Manhattan abode, and will have to learn to endure country life.  Leo Tolstoy, of course, is overjoyed - he never liked cities anyway.  Emma Bovary is threatening to poison herself if she has to move to the country, but then, nobody takes Emma Bovary very seriously.  Walt Whitman is at home anywhere he goes, but Edward Albee is decidedly grumpy and is talking about writing a play about two people who move to a mysterious mansion in the country and then go mad because of solitude and the absence of Zabar's, and finally take their revenge by talking one another to death.  He's going to call it Tiny Palace.

There's still a lot left to pack, and I do not have too many books.