A mess of books
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Lately, books had become a problem.
Yes, sweet, innocent books.
Most of my volumes have been sleeping quietly in the back rooms of the house, the book covers closed by the girl who kissed them and put them there.
But I have more books than I do shelf space and the living room absorbed the overflow.
Part of the problem is that I drag out my favorites and then I want to keep them near my writing desk, which happens to be in the front room.
Another reason for the increased clutter is a recent windfall. When my dad and stepmother moved from their house to an apartment, they gave me several boxes of Kansas-related books. I stacked those books on the living room floor.
Two of them look especially interesting: “Kansas Post Offices: May 29, 1828-August 3, 1961” by Robert Baughman and “Kansas at the World’s Fair, 1893.”
The post office book shows that through 1961, there had been a total of 52 post offices in Lyon County (known as Breckenridge County until 1862). I learned that Neosho Rapids was once called Italia and that Americus started out as Orleans.
The other book is a hardbound report about Kansas’ contribution to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It describes in unbelievable detail the exhibits in the Kansas Building. Photographs show pyramids of grasses and pagodas of grain, rock salt from Lyons and stone from Cottonwood Falls.
There’s even a photo of “The Emporia Fountain,” in which “prairie dogs sat on their haunches ready to act as a reception committee, assisted by long-eared jack rabbits, inviting visitors to ‘Come drink with the boys and girls of Kansas.’”
But, I digress.
Meanwhile, in my living room, the towers of titles began to tilt.
I bumped into a stack and hardbacks tumbled. The cat freaked out and the crash of books left words shattered on the floor. It was a mess — there were sentence fragments and loose syllables all over the place.
Don’t believe that “sticks and stones” nursery rhyme. Words can hurt you — especially if you step on a broken one with bare feet. Some of those consonants are sharp little critters. And make no mistake — vowels are like marbles on the floor.
It was time for a year-end de-cluttering.
Maybe you have a similar problem. Perhaps you, too, have too many books or CDs, or for that matter, too many ceramic roosters. Collections grow.
Sure, I could buy more bookshelves, but shelves need walls to lean on. And if you begin to add walls, where do you stop?
So at each of my overburdened bookcases, I picked through the fiction and non-fiction, selecting titles that I could donate to the Friends of the Library for their next sale.
I planned to be ruthless in purging these publications, for instance, giving up the Anne Tyler novels I began collecting in the ’80s. After all, if I want to reread them, the public library has copies.
But then I held Tyler’s “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” in my hands and remembered how much I enjoyed that book at the time. I put it back on the shelf.
With many of my books, there’s a lingering aura, something about them that touched me. Some of the non-fiction books may have a single paragraph that made a vital impact, but that one paragraph is a gift from the author.
I kept those books which offered that connection, the ones which gave me a new vision or fresh insight or maybe a few pleasant hours of escape.
On this first round of elimination, I released about 40 books, sent them on their merry way. But I’m left with hundreds of favorites; I’m still surrounded by old friends.
F Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.