Why I’m Done With Books (Part 1.)

How many books do you need? When do you know you have enough? Is there a limit on how many books is good for you, and are more necessarily better? And what do you do when you possess far more print than you could ever realistically read in one normal human life span?

I was thinking these thoughts – and others of a more shouty, profane nature – as I carried the forty seventh box down two flights of stairs, catching my wrist once again on the splintered corner of the second landing, and piled it unsteadily on the forty sixth while waiting for a van to take me to Temple Works. The books had been in my sister’s attic for the past five years, seventy one boxes in all, plus a dozen sacks of stuff damaged in the most recent leak. The van never came. Broken down in Bridlington,or so I heard. I managed to transport fifty odd boxes the day after in two trips in a friends estate car. That left almost twenty boxes tottering in Janine’s kitchen. She didn’t communicate with me all the following week. Or, indeed, the next. I am avoiding speculation as to why that may be. My youngest sister is patience personified and she will never mention the latest imposition on her good nature. But the bloody books have come between us.

“A room without books is like a body without a soul,” said Cicero. That may have been true in Roman times; books were harder to come by back then before the days of mechanical reproduction and must have seemed precious, almost spiritual objects. But the aphoristic Stoic owned a large estate and could get his slaves to stuff every room in his great big mansion to the rafters if he wished. He had room for soul, and he could afford it. Trouble is for me the more books I bought the fewer rooms I had to put then in. This isn’t a boast but recently I calculated that I’d spent nearly £125,000 on books in my life, and that’s the price of a decent house. Instead, in the past ten years I have been reduced from a four bed detached house in the suburbs to a small room in a rented house in Beeston. So much for the idea that reading indicates intelligence! And my books have always ended up occupying other people’s rooms, an unwanted presence, a reminder of a promise exploited, a sort of possession. It really is time to exorcise them. The books will find their final resting place in the reception of Temple Works where we are making a kind of temporary second hand book shop – I almost uttered the phrase “pop up” but that is the most dire cliche of the time and hardly describes the process of lugging several thousand volumes of serious literature around a grade one listed monument and creating a mausoleum to the shadow side of bibliomania.

This isn’t the first time I have had a clear out. Getting on for a decade ago I suffered my biggest loss during the first few weeks of splitting up with my wife, a tricky, traumatic, tearful process, not helped by the constant presence of the inlaws. I’d come back to the marital home to retrieve a few belongings and sort out some financial concerns, only to find a skip alongside the back gate barring my entrance. The skip contained all the books that were in the hallway, the living room, and scattered around the lower part of the house. My study – on the top floor, thankfully – was unmolested. My father-in-law was a money grubbing petty bourgeois tight wad with a heart condition and little in the way of wit or imagination. No stairs and just the price of a single skip was all he was prepared to pay to teach me a lesson. I remember my chagrin when confronted with the battered and torn remains of a good half my book collection – though I did smile to myself that he’d managed to dispose of all the stuff I’d outgrown, the stuff I was happy to give away anyway. He’d saved me the job of carting it out of the house. I was thankful that he was a stickler for the rules and that the skip warned in large red capitals; NO FIRES! Book burning would have been beyond stupid, even for him. Later that day I helped a friend load a van and take the lot to a local mental health facility. Good things do occasionally come out of bad intentions.

Quite a few books still survive from those dark times. Leszek Kolakovski’s massive trilogy on the history of Marxism somehow managed to make it despite having sat unread on the shelf ever since my disillusionment with messianic politics, which must have occurred sometime in my twenties. Surely, it must have been before I made twenty seven, no excuse beyond that! There’s half a hundred weight of Heidegger too, stacks of ponderous, impenetrable metaphysics that at one point in my life I must have believed made me a solemn, deep and thoughtful sort of chap. How insufferable was I to live with I wonder, my face constantly buried in obscure ontological ruminations! I must have lightened up since then or simply realised I’m not capable of constant gloom, else it’s a case of diminishing brain cells. Saying that there’s lots of Lacan still, an unfeasible amount of French psychobabble, pompous twaddle the lot of it. And masses of theology – not that I ever believed, I simply worked in mental health and was curious to know what the hell the schizo’s were on about. Somebody must still want this stuff?

In the following few years I shared a five bedroom house with my darling Penelope. We had space. I had a study. There was a spare room, and a spare spare room. I built shelves in the living room, shelves in the kitchen, even shelves high up over the bathroom door – I was never away from my local Arnold Laver and the constructions I could conjure up out of stack of precisely sawn planks and a tube of No More Nails were the stuff of local legend. And I was earning a packet as a consultant. My book habit got out of control. In my teens I was a ten book a week user and my parents worried. By my twenties I was into a steady fifteen a week habit, and I thought I could handle it. There was no government health warning. But with a big budget and endless opportunity I was scoring twenty plus books a week and the addiction was beginning to tell on me. Books were threatening to take over the whole house. Penelope, the love of my life, my soul mate, my muse, my heart-stoppingly beautiful lover, my best friend in the whole world ever – and the woman who paid half the mortgage – threatened me; it was her or the books.

I was single again.

Speaking of which I am reminded of an old friend, a confirmed bachelor and avid book collector who I bumped into recently on the train back from York. We passed perfunctory pleasantries then rummaged through each others bags and spent a happy half hour critiquing our respective haul. I’d often been in this chaps house and there were quite literally books on every available surface. The airing cupboard contained stacks of academic journals and the larder housed the most obscure magazines imaginable. Both sides of the stairs were packed with Penguins and Puffins. Around the sink were soggy piles of New Left Review. Even the oven was not safe. If he’d had a tumble dryer it would have tumbled the complete works of Max Weber. As we neared Garforth he recounted a sad tale of losing nearly ten thousand books last Christmas when he went away for a week and came home to find the roof half blown off and a flood in the attic. That’s what happens when you spend more on furnishing the mind and feeding the soul than on maintaining ones bricks and mortar.

My friend was lucky, he had insurance – well luck perhaps is not the word, obviously his home contents policy had rather more to do with good foresight than good fortune! He’s not a practical man but he knows how to fill in a direct debit form. I on the other hand have never been sure of the exact status of my books since of late they mostly resided in premises not in my possession. If they were damaged, destroyed or lost that would simply be the end of it. A good few hundred got trashed this year owing to a leaky window. What’s the point in owning books that are simply a liability? Which stretch the bonds of sibling tolerance to snapping point?

The thought of dispossessing myself of a good part of the product of my rampant, unbridled, runaway bibliomania has been building in the back of my mind for some time as reason has piled upon reason why I can no longer afford to belabour my bank account, burden my family and bother my friends, till last week like too many hardbacks on a poorly fixed shelf it all came crashing down, culminating in a clatter of intellectual wreckage. Now is the time, I groaned to myself; time to do away with the lumber of a lifetime.

Ruthlessly severing all ties with the accumulated folly of a lifetime neatly feeds into a fantasy to which I’ve always been rather partial, of travelling light, existing with the barest of belongings, levitating over the path of life without leaving the faintest trace of a moccasin shod footprint. This is of course patent nonsense. Reality is anathema to me. Normal social intercourse an unspeakable horror. I have never spent more than an hour without some form of literature raised between me and the cold cruel world, and that under duress. Without a book in my hand and a pen in my pocket I simply don’t feel dressed. Intellectual nakedness is a nice ideology, and like all the best ideologies is best kept untried. Yet the notion to ditch the books isn’t just some delightful whimsy, a sort of harmless effluvia emitted from the rapid decay of mental capacity; the brutal fact is that I am simply insolvent, indigent, and incorrigibly inebriated . . . I probably don’t deserve so many books in the first place. Or, to put it another way, they haven’t actually done me much good, have they! Abandoning the books is a lot like a belated recognition that it’s time to grow up, get real, face reality, and all those assorted cliches that got ignored when I was a teenager.

My dad must get the blame for making me into such a book obsessed incompetent. As I used to be in the therapy business I know all the tricks to make that accusation stick. Dad only ever read one book in his life, as he proudly, defiantly, and occasionally under the influence of too much alcohol, belligerently would tell anyone within earshot. Which is why I instituted early on an iron wall of separation demarcating family from friends and work colleagues. There can be no trade or traffic between the two states. The book he read can never be mentioned outside the family bloc. Never ask about it. Dad did however buy me my first book – I mean proper book not childrens story, they are vastly different animals.

I was eleven. Bespectacled, precocious, budding intellectual, my parents dragged me away on a family holiday to Bridlington, which as you may imagine was not on my list of fifty things to do before you turn fifteen. So I did what any family loathing brat would do, zipped the hood of my parka tight, dragged the heels of my Tuff shoes, and only spoke in monosyllables of complete contempt as I shadowed the parents as they attempted to enjoy the seaside. Mum stopped to look in the window of a junk shop. Dad engaged her in a conversation about the aesthetic charms of a pottery shire horse weighed down with an unfeasible collection of brass. I sighed demonstrably. Then I caught sight of a bookshelf. And the words Karl Marx. All I knew at eleven was that I’d heard my favourite teacher – Mr Coates, a bearded, elbow patched, bounding Labrador of a man who genuinely cared what us kids thought and seemed to want us to think for ourselves (in fact he once set me on a six month project to prove to him that the world was round after I’d said something excruciatingly crass like “we all know . . . sir, it’s obvious!” . . . I never did prove it either) – mention the name Marx in tones of reverence and awe. I decided to lecture my parents at length on the seriousness of philosophy and the demands of a life devoted to abstract thought as opposed to the puerility of pottery knick-knacks. I could tell my dad was impressed. He told me if I didn’t button it and stop being mean to my mum I’d get a whack of philosophy round the back of my head. Dialectic was never his strong point but I appreciated his intuitive grasp of the materialist point of view and his refusal to be swayed by false consciousness. I shut up and seethed with superiority. That night though, after I’d spent a couple of hours engaging the penny arcades in the class struggle and dad had been to the pub, I heard him plonking bags down on the kitchen table and calling me and mum downstairs. I assumed a win on the geegees. There were two pottery figures on the table, much to mums delight, and five books. He knew what would make mum happy, so he’d bought double, but he wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted so he’d bought half the shelf! Astoundingly he’d managed to purchase the Marx, the 1844 Manuscripts in a lovely Lawrence and Wishart edition, pale blue and cream with a slightly yellowed spine and a reek of dust and pipe smoke, which was the most singularly beautiful thing I’d ever held in my hands up until then. The other books were Stalin on War, something about the rights of small nations to self determination, a Dennis Wheatley – which I did try to read but found it silly and gave me a distaste for anything occult, spine chilling and supernatural that has never left me – and a silver, severe tome on Soviet literary theory by some saintly looking bloke from Vladivostok. This was my idea of heaven. I’d thought I wanted one book. I’d ended up with many. Possibilities were expansive, explosive, quite literally endless. Dad opened up the world of book collecting by one act of unthinking, clumsy, drunken generosity.

Besides instigating my book obsession, dad also aided and abetted my habit as it grew. He was in many respects an enabler. Not that he ever bought me another book or engaged in any conversation regarding reading matter, far from it. Dad never got it. What he did understand, however, what he was profoundly conscious of, and what kept us talking when we had nothing much else to say to one another, was that books were a bloody pain to shift. Dad was a heavy goods driver. He moved stuff about the country in big, noisy, filthy lorries. Whenever I moved – and I moved a lot – dad would always be there, van ready, packing and stacking, taking control of logistics. Once I had to make a speedy escape from rented accommodation when I was a student in Hull – my flat mate and I had spent the terms rent on a major bender and he had managed to remove his few belongings before telling me the landlord meant to track me down and make of my sorry carcass an example to other students. I rang home. Dad was on his way back from Dundee. He’d been on the road for over 16 hours, delivering machine parts and drill bits to oil rigs. He was only miles from home. I pleaded with mum. I wheedled. I may have whined. Dad arrived at ten o clock, evidently exhausted, sullen, grim, full of flu and fury. He loaded all my stuff in the back of the empty lorry without saying a word then jabbed an oily finger at the passenger seat. We drove home in silence. A month went by before my mum ordered me to take him to the pub and say sorry.

Dad must have moved me and the books a dozen times since then. This is the first time I’ve had to shift them without his guiding hand. He’s having a lung out next week. Not much chance he’ll be available in the near future. Another reason to let the books go; thoughts of mortality. I can’t possibly read them all, and I can’t take then with me in any sense of the phrase.