My Library: Elizabeth Kadetsky’s Suitcase

While on a seven-month Fulbright Nehru fellowship to India this spring, Elizabeth Kadetsky (author of The Memory Eaters) initially packed light when it came to reading material. However, she notes: “I had a box of books shipped to me, and acquired many more, while also shedding books as I finished them. I wound up never finding an apartment on the fellowship, and traveling from place to place to stay in hotels and bed and breakfasts with three suitcases, one entirely filled with books. I got a lot of comments about how heavy it was!”

This is a slightly different My Library post than what we normally see here, but a library is a library is a library, whether it’s at home or abroad, right? Enjoy your armchair travels with Elizabeth as she adapts to being away from her home library for half a year....

Reader:  Elizabeth Kadetsky

Location:  New Delhi, India

Collection size:  At any given time, my traveling collection is about 15 books. When I finish a book, I photograph the pages that have my notes penciled in and give the book away to someone who I think will appreciate it. One of my recipients always gives me another book in return, though, so my suitcase never seems to get any lighter. Many of the books connect to my research topic as a Fulbright Nehru grantee, which is about the global trade in stolen antiquities and the unethical role of museums in supporting it. My five-year-old’s Tintin collection and his Harry Potter: The Philosopher’s Stone are also in there.

The one book I’d run back into a burning building to rescue:  Back home in Pennsylvania, I have a signed mass market paperback edition of Joan Didion’s Play It as it Lays published in 1972. I picked it up in a used bookstore not knowing that it was signed. The bookseller probably also didn’t know that it was signed; it still has the price that I paid for it written on the top right of the flyleaf, 65 cents. The inscription reads, “one day at davis”—which is so quintessentially Didion.

Favorite book from childhood:  Half Magic, by Edward Eager, first published in 1954. I recently picked it up again to read to my son, but the writing style was extremely mannered and British-ish, even though the author was American. Still, all the short stories that I wrote before the age of 12 involved someone discovering something that gave them magical powers (like the coin in Half Magic), but with a caveat (as in Half Magic, in which every desire is granted only halfway), so it had a big influence on me.

My guilty pleasure book:  The Raj Quartet, the four-novel series by Paul Scott about the independence of India, published between 1966 and 1975. I read the entire first volume, The Jewel in the Crown, on the plane to India during my first trip here in 1997. This series is often criticized for its focus on Westerners in India (Salman Rushdie complained that it depicts Indians as “bit players” in their own history), and that is a fair criticism. But, to me, it is the book that illustrates and the critiques the mindset of the British Raj better than any other. For an outsider American with no first-hand experience of colonialism, it provided a searing and justified dissection of everything paternalistic and offensive about British Imperialism in the subcontinent and the shoddy manner in which the British eventually “quit” India in 1947.

Elizabeth Kadetsky’s memoir-in-essays, The Memory Eaters, explores family illness, addiction, inherited trauma, and the secrets of her inherited past. She is also author of the memoir First There Is a Mountain, the short story collection The Poison that Purifies You, and the novella On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World. A professor of creative writing at Penn State and nonfiction editor at the New England Review, she is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Program, MacDowell Colony, and Vermont Studio Center.

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

Where the Books Went

The books had become a burden.

That’s not a sentence I would ever have dreamed of writing when I was younger. “Younger” meaning eighteen months ago. Until recently, I went around saying things like “There’s no such thing as too many books, only too little time in which to read them.” I declared I would measure my coffin according to the number of volumes I could squeeze inside its piney confines. Part with my books? You might as well cut my arm off with a rusty saw.

And yet, the timbers of my Craftsman home in Butte, Montana groaned under the weight of paper and ink. The shelves lining the walls of my basement had long since been filled, and over-filled—like a corpulent guest at Thanksgiving dinner who, after the turkey and the stuffing and the sweet potatoes and the cranberry sauce and the gravy, greedily cuts just One More Slice of Pumpkin Pie. With whipped cream.

The books were every-frickin-where in the 4,000-square-foot house: there were piles in the bathroom, stacks in the breakfast nook, and a haphazard litter of titles to be shelved weighing down the polished-wood bar in the basement. My collection, which had been built and curated over the past thirty years of my life, was out of control. It was the literary version of The Trouble with Tribbles.

Books came into the house, but none went out. I was saturated and oversaturated. By my estimate, and according to my Library Thing catalog, my shelves were stuffed with more than 13,000 books. The real “trouble,” of course was the fact that I could not stop buying books. I am, I guess, part magpie: I cannot resist a new, shiny object. I was a bookaholic in much the same way that many people struggle with grape and grain; I had to start avoiding bookstores like twelve-steppers vow never to step foot inside a bar again. As an author who frequently goes on book tours, this was impossible. But I tried to control myself. I tried, I really tried.

And failed.

It was a slowly-dawning awareness, but eventually, I reached—and passed—my breaking point. Long ago, I had crossed the line when I had more books than I could possibly read in my lifetime (in truth, more books than the most secluded hermit could ever read). A speed-reading course wouldn’t even make a difference. The tipping point came when my wife and I made the decision to put the house on the market and move into smaller quarters. The original plan was to live in our new 25-foot RV. We would travel the country and Live Small. We’ve since tapped the brakes on that idea—not entirely ruling it out, but not committing to that miniaturized lifestyle, either. (Plus, the house in Butte still hasn’t sold, so we’re biding our time here in Montana for now.) We had an estate sale and sold more than 80 percent of our worldly goods; we’re now living in this oversized house with just a sofa, a bed, two nightstands, and just a few sticks of furniture. Our three cats spend their days chasing dust bunnies and listening to the echoes of their meows bounce off the bare hardwood floors. (And no, before you ask, we’re not marching to the beat of Marie Kondo and all those decluttering books which currently clutter the aisles of bookstores; this is a long-brewing, personal decision which has nothing to do with popular trends.)

Everything, from the camcorder bought in 2010 to the massive antique wardrobe in the upstairs bedroom, was sold. If my wife could part with her pewter salt-and-pepper shaker collection, I knew I, too, needed to make my own hard sacrifices. The books had to go. But where?

For the past year, I had been carting fat bookbags to Second Edition Books in Butte where the owner, Ann, bought somewhere around 1,000 books (and God bless her for her generosity and patience with my bi-weekly trips into her store where I continually ask, like a scratched record, “Can you take any more off my hands?”).

But off-loading at the used bookstore was just one slice of the Thanksgiving-feast pie. After separating out the ones I wanted to keep—

[Oh, excuse me, did you think I would get rid of all the books? If so, you obviously don’t know me. It was an emotionally-difficult culling process, but I picked and I chose, I sorted and set aside, I boxed and then unboxed and re-boxed indecisively. Eventually, I preserved about 1,000 of my most treasured volumes. I kept all of the Flannery O’Connor; ditto with Dickens, Hemingway, Richard Brautigan, Lewis Nordan (you can have my Nordan collection when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers) and Raymond Carver, along with a handful of my favorite living authors—though I won’t name names to avoid any hurt feelings from someone who didn’t make the cut. I saved my Dell mapbacks collection and my Big Littles. I held on to a small shelf of beloved children’s books. I kept my Penguin Classics and all my Library of America volumes.]

The survivors of the Great Book Culling of 2019

I carried The Keepers to an upstairs bedroom and though they lined an entire wall, removing them from the basement only made a minor dent in the overall collection. How, and where, could I possibly unload a lifetime’s worth of books? The answer came in the most unexpected of ways.

My friend Christine Martin, board director of the local non-profit organization The Root and Bloom Collective, was at my house in late summer to buy several of my bookcases (the ones which had been recently emptied of their contents) and, knowing of my book “burden,” she looked at the rows and rows of spines and said, “You know, we might be interested in buying some of these from you...”

“We?” I said.

“The Root and Bloom. We’re in the early stages of building our own library and some of these books would make a good start for what we want to do.”

“Some?” I said, teasingly (but also seriously). “What about all? Would you be willing to take all of them?”

“Oh.” She stared at the two hundred tons of paper, ink and glue. “Well....Let me talk to our board and directors and see what they say.”

*     *     *

They said yes.

And so, the next week Christine returned with empty boxes and a few volunteers from the Root and Bloom to help pack what she later estimated were 180 boxes. “No one had to go to the gym that week,” she told the local TV news station.

For several days, the basement of my house was noisy with the rumble of heavy books dropping into cardboard boxes and the shrieks of packing tape sealing the flaps. Christine and her small army, the Book Brigade, arrived early each day and spent hours pulling, sorting, and cramming. I popped in on my lunch hour to check on their progress and I always went away feeling a little bad: my burden had become their burden. The sheer number of books was overwhelming and I felt sorry for the Book Brigade and their sweat-damp faces and sore muscles.

But eventually, everything was boxed up and carted off. I felt only relief.

That soon turned to joy when Christine told me of her plans for the books: “These will be the start of a new library we’re establishing at the Jacobs House. We’re going to call it the Edwin C. Dobb Memorial Peace Library.”

I had to turn away for a minute. Suddenly, there was a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes.

*     *    *

Before his all-too-soon death this past July, Ed Dobb was one of the best word-slingers to ever come out of Butte, Montana. His articles about the troubled history of this copper-mining town, “Pennies From Hell” and “Dirty Old Town,” are revered as masterpieces of journalism; they’re the yardstick against which everything else written about Butte is measured. Ed was also the co-producer of the terrific documentary film Butte, America. The blood that flowed through Ed’s veins was the color of pennies.

Ed emailed me out of the blue one day in 2010, one year after I’d moved to the Mining City and shortly after my interview with Tom McGuane appeared in New West magazine. The subject line of the email was “Comparing Pens” and it opened like this:

Hey, David, I enjoyed your interview with McGuane in New West. Also noted with delight that you’re living in Butte. Clearly you’re mad....What sort of unspeakable crimes would condemn you to such a desolate place?....Doubtless you’ve now heard the old joke: One of the best things about living in Butte is that Montana is close by. I think how a person responds to the quirky, often forbidding island ruin of Butte says a lot about a person’s character and sensibility.

I leaned closer to my laptop screen. I’d found a kindred spirit, someone who removed his rose-colored glasses before sweeping his eyes across the scraped and scarred landscape of this town. Ed loved Butte, but he also understood its complexities: the ugly and the lovely.

Ed sent me more essays to read, including this one about cold-water swimming which began:

Although I had been swimming on and off since moving from southwest Montana back to San Francisco in mid-January, my new season officially started on April 17th, the day I turned 60. It was a bright afternoon, the sun partially obscured by high thin clouds, gusts churning the surface of Aquatic Park, a manmade cove bounded by curved piers on the waterfront. That’s where I swim, along with others whose notion of a swell time is plying chilly San Francisco Bay while wearing nothing but a cap and a Speedo. And chilly it was that day—water about 55 degrees, or 30 degrees cooler than the average municipal pool. Whatever pleasures await the cold-water sea swimmer—and they are incomparable, even, at times, transcendent—reaching them entails a certain amount of discomfort. Every swim begins with a double leap—the physical act of plunging into the water, the mental act of deliberately submitting to pain.

Going back over that article now, half a year after Ed died at 69 of complications from a heart condition, I read it as metaphor. Ed was writing about swimming, yes; but—and I hope he’ll forgive me for stretching his words—he could easily have been writing about the process of shedding my beloved books: the icy shock of the decision to rid myself of what I’d once held so dear, deliberately subjecting myself to the pain of loss.

But now, as Christine told me of Root and Bloom’s plan for the books, I realized it wasn’t loss and grief I should be feeling, but happiness and comfort. My 30-year library would have a new life and find new readers and, best of all, it would carry my friend’s name and legacy with it into the future. I couldn’t have planned a better fate for the books.

*     *    *

Two months after the last box was packed and carried out the front door, I paid my books—my former books—a visit at the Jacobs House. Many of them were still in their cartons, stacked like a small mountain range in the middle of the floor; but enough had made their way onto the shelves—my old bookcases—for me to browse. I tilted my head and ran my eyes across the familiar spines. “Hello, old friends,” I whispered. “It’s good to see you again.”

I restrained myself: I did not shake the shelves and sweep the books into my arms and carry them out the door. Instead I felt a pang of guilt for holding them in a miser’s grip for all those years, knowing I could never read even a fraction of the collection—no, not even a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg’s worth—before I died. Now, other visitors to the Edwin C. Dobb Memorial Peace Library would have the chance to read what I built and saved over the decades.

I went back to Ed Dobb’s article on swimming in the icy waters near Alcatraz and his words took on fresh meaning:

How long it takes for the body’s internal heat to counteract the penetrating cold varies widely, depending on several factors—metabolism, conditioning, overall acclimation, how hard one swims. But whether the interim is measured in seconds or minutes, a kind of alchemy is at work, converting the forbidding into the ecstatic. What makes the shift possible is conviction, the belief that eventually the sting will recede, the shock replaced by something that cannot be experienced anywhere else.

What I once feared most—losing my books—had been converted to joy. A new refrain ran through my head: It is better to share than to hoard.

I was at peace with my loss.

Ed Dobb swimming toward Alcatraz

Valerie Nieman’s Library: The Many-Chambered Heart

Reader:  Valerie Nieman
Location:  Greensboro, NC
Collection Size:  About 1,650
The one book I'd run back into a burning building to rescue:  My uncle Jerry went back into a lightning-struck house to rescue his father’s books, (after first carrying him out of the fire, as he was disabled.) I guess that story means I’d have to grab those once-rescued volumes of Mark Twain (see below) and Emerson and Tennyson. Oh! Of course, the brass-bound 1860 Bible, inscribed in spidery sepia ink with a mother’s poetic benediction to “My Dear Son” as he went to war. It was used for my parents’ wedding and the funerals of my mother’s parents.
Favorite book from childhood:  Jack London’s stories—a volume I bought at a school book fair. Still have it. And Girl of the Limberlost. I was a solitary child wandering the woods, so this book spoke to me—but finding it online in recent years, I was appalled at the prose. Still, it gave me encouragement in my expeditions. Also Huckleberry Finn, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and books about horses and nature including Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.
Guilty pleasure book:  Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Counting the Books

Too many books? Never!

Well, maybe.

I’ve spent a life accumulating, sorting, sifting, giving, receiving. Now with retirement in sight, I weigh each book I buy, thinking how many I soon will have to let go.

They are all over the house, in the wood-paneled “den” where I work, in the living room, the bedroom, the spare bedroom, the former office. At work, they fill two tall bookcases, including one that will kill me if an earthquake happens to hit Greensboro while I’m sitting at my desk.

Until I took on this assignment to write about my library for The Quivering Pen, I’d never counted them. I moved from West Virginia to North Carolina in 1997 with 32 back-breaking boxes of books in my collection, that much I know, and in the words of Jacob Marley, “You have laboured on it, since.” The ponderous boxes of books are many, many more in number now.

For this photo essay, I could have tidied up and organized, given my bookshelves the artificial gloss of Instagram faces, but decided to stick with the gritty reality. The photos don’t show it, but there is organization, of a sort.

In my working area, I have 70-plus books of poetry in the first of two maple bookcases my mother made for herself while working at Ethan Allen in Jamestown, New York. They are 1950s vintage, honey-brown, like buckwheat honey. Then there are 110 (probably half the total, the rest being hidden in crates) of the “contributor copies” of journals and anthologies where I’ve appeared, and copies of my books. On the credenza, 23 books for ready reference. On the antique iron plant stand, 34 books in the on-deck circle for reading. On the fireplace side shelves, 38 antique books that once inhabited the upstairs den at my parents farmhouse in Randolph, New York, with the copperplate signatures of relatives three generations back. A dozen books stacked on the coffee table and a big pile of journals on a little stool. Almost 300 books just in the den.

The living room—what old-timey people would have called the parlor, as it’s used just for guests—has a number of coffee-table books and my favorite volume for inspiration, The Book of Symbols, left open for browsing.

The guest bed room is home to the matching bookcase Mom made at the “splinter factory,” with 50-plus books chosen for the enjoyment of guests, as well as a few journals.

The “library” was once my writing room. When I divorced, I changed things around, moving my writing space into the den, where I can lounge by the fire and where a blank wall before my desk keeps me from getting lost in the outside view.

Not counting extra copies of my own books, I’d say there are close to 900 books in this room, going all the way back to the Little Golden Books my parents bought me, when times were tough but there was always a quarter for a book. Butterflies. The Forest. I have double-decked layers of paperbacks starting with the first ones I bought for myself off the Rexall drug store revolving book rack: The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, Dune by Frank Herbert.

The top shelves are filled and over-stacked with signed books bought at readings over the years. Many of these writers have become good friends. Some I’ve never seen again, but their voices come back when I open their books.

The lower shelves house the full set of Mark Twain in green cloth bindings, bought after my maternal grandfather got to know him on a train trip, my go-to reading during long summers as the books were readily available in “the den.” I read Tom Sawyer, of course, I read every volume, and for a while was enamored with the two-volume life of Joan of Arc. And the complete 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, noteworthy as the last edition published with signed articles. It’s all there, the onionskin pages intact, except for the map of New York State that I pulled out for a grade-school project. Yes, I was once a book vandal, to my shame.

Along with all these beloved books, the shelves house bits of memorabilia— a horseshoe crab tail found on an Oak Island beach when my parents lived near there. Sand dollars. Stones from mountain walks and from St. Martin and from the pebbly plage at Nice. A pair of long, narrow dressmaker’s shears. A rabbit that I wood-burned into a piece of plywood for a long-ago Christmas present for my father. Interesting stamps. A plastic bass lure I plucked from a snag at Cassadaga Lake.

At work, I’ve lined the back portion of my desk with copies of my publications, and then filled two tall bookcases with literature that I might use in classes, but also books that I just like to look at, and through. Friends. Also textbooks, of course, and the academic detritus of tenure portfolios and faculty handbooks. I’d estimate 375 books.

Books come to me, novels sent in for reviewing at the newspapers where I’ve worked, books from a former boyfriend who was moving and needed to downsize, books bought at church book sales, books left by friends or traded, even a few books rescued from the street side trash. And so many books have left me, especially books that I’ve lent to students, knowing most would not come back. Two copies of Breece D’J Pancake’s stories went that way. The students needed them more than I did.

It’s daunting to think of the cull to come, how I’ll try to find homes for many of these books. People don’t seem to want physical books as much. Old volumes are sold by the linear foot, and by the color, for people to use as interior decoration. Some will go to my nephew, some to friends, some perhaps to a college collection.

Lately, I’ve been accumulating e-books, handy while traveling although not as satisfying as a book in the hand.

Too many books? Never.

Appalachian heritage is the common thread binding Valerie Nieman’s wide range of writing, from mainstream fiction to horror, and both lyric and narrative poetry. Her latest novel, To the Bones (West Virginia University Press), is a genre-bending satire of the coal industry and its effects on Appalachia. Her third poetry collection, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse, was published in fall 2018. Nieman’s writing has appeared widely in journals and in numerous anthologies, including Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She teaches workshops at John C. Campbell Folk School, NC Writers Network conferences, and many other venues. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte and a former journalist, she now teaches creative writing at North Carolina A&T State University.

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

A Dead Man’s Books: Jennifer Spiegel’s Library

Reader:  Jennifer Spiegel
Location:  Phoenix, Arizona
Collection Size:  No real clue.
The one book I'd run back into a burning building to rescue:  None. See below. That doesn’t mean that I don’t love them.
Favorite book from childhood:  I actually saved a ton for my kids, but my favorites are the Oz Books by L. Frank Baum. I’m pretty sure they changed my life. I love them so much.
Guilty pleasure book:  Maybe The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. I’ve also been known to read a zombie novel or two, though I think I’ve met my quota and I’m done. Oh, and I like political memoirs. And U2 coffee table books. I see a coffee table book next to me, and it’s about Tiny Houses.


I love my nonsensical, random collection of books. My shelves cannot purport to be a library. That’s too noble. I do, however, have a house full of books.

I had a sobering moment in 2015. In the late spring of that year, I helped my mom pack up and officially downsize. She’d been a widow since 2002, and she had lived in the same house since the seventies. Both of my parents were avid readers (though I spent a great deal of time making fun of my dad’s James Michener habit and all of those Cold War thrillers that were turned into Cold War movies). She was moving to a guest house, and she’d hold onto a handful of books collected over a lifetime.

She picked out her keepers. I scavenged and pulled out a few, like Leon Uris’s QB VII, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, and Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War. And then I took boxes and boxes and boxes to sell at a used bookstore. It wasn’t because we didn’t love them; it was because we had no room for them. I must’ve had that Sybil book in there (Flora Rheta Schreiber), and Alex Haley’s Roots. James Clavell’s Shogun. Ken Follett, Mario Puzo, Norman Mailer, John Le Carré, too. Maybe one woman: The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough. All of these books, these special and beloved books, these demarcations of eras and these veritable points on a map. A lot of my father.

I packed them in boxes.

I loaded them into my car.

I drove to a bookstore.

And they gave me a couple of bucks for them.

That was my sobering moment.

You Can’t Take It With You.

I still keep my books. Most of them, anyway. I still believe in houses full of books. Shelves runneth-ing over. But—and I do not say this lightly—I might value them a little less than I once did. (I might be crying as I write this.)

I will, though, still say this boldly, brazenly: Shame on you if you do not own books.

So, in lieu of a library, I offer you this vision of my shelves.

My beloved travel books, disorganized, with a smattering of others like a Rolling Stone picture book and the scripts to sex, lies, and videotape and Do The Right Thing. That Let’s Go Europe book is from 1990, and readers of my new novel might note its treasured role.

Selected Books-I-Must-Save. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Salman Rushdie’s Fury and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and B.J. Novak’s One More Thing. Please note that Ta-nehisi Coates is next to Rick Springfield. I think that Coates’ book is the definitive book on the Obama years. I can’t explain Rick Springfield (we go back) except to say this:

These are mostly my kids’ books: Harry Potter, Little House on the Prairie, and Oz. Below that are the textbooks from my MA program in International Relations, from my defunct politics days.

And these are books that I will undoubtedly make my kids read. Many classics. A lot of Hemingway. Bleak House. Cry, The Beloved Country. Catch-22. The Good Earth. Wait! And what’s that I see? Mockingjay? (And a little stack of my books.)

My kids. I do not have an Allegiant-thing. Sesame Street, yes. Allegiant, no.

You have the Childcraft books, right? I mean, we all do, yeah?

Miscellaneous! Because sometimes you want poetry and sometimes you want Disney and sometimes you want Leaves of Grass, the Bible, and U2.

I fill shelves. Some of my shelves are from Ikea. Some are from friends who were getting rid of them. Some are nice. We even have a secret door in our house, a passageway.

But when I die, you can take my books. They are yours.

Jennifer Spiegel is mostly a fiction writer with three books and a miscellany of short publications, though she also teaches English and creative writing. She is part of Snotty Literati, a book-reviewing gig, with Lara Smith. She lives with her family in Arizona. More information is available at www.jenniferspiegel.com. And So We Die, Having First Slept, a new novel, is about marriage, youth, middle-age, Gen X, and fidelity. Currently, Spiegel is working on a memoir, Cancer, I'll Give You One Year: A Non-Informative Guide To Breast Cancer, or Cancer, I'll Give You One Year: How To Get Your Ba-Da-Bing Boobies On The House!

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

New House, New Shelves: Mary Vensel White’s Library

Reader:  Mary Vensel White
Location:  Southern California
Collection size:  750ish
The one book I’d run back into a burning building to rescue:  I wouldn’t run back into a burning building! As much as I love my books, most are replaceable, one way or another.
Favorite book from childhood:  A four-volume set of illustrated Disney stories
Guilty pleasure book:  Hm. I can’t think of anything in the book department I feel guilty for reading. I do watch a lot of bad television, however.

What I miss most about the house where I lived for almost eight years until this past August are the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves installed at the top of the stairs, in the landing area on the second floor. The space was blank when we bought the house, a perfect place for the shelves, which were white with mustard yellow backing that matched the nearby walls. My entire collection fit on these shelves, along with a column for children’s books (favorite picture books through the Young Adult novels my kids read before they stopped reading outside of school), yearbooks, assorted reference and coffee-table books, and rows of probably way too many photo albums. It wasn’t the first version of my library, but it was the most fully realized. I loved those shelves, loved having my books in one place with room to grow.

I started collecting books as a student. I kept everything: novels and non-fiction but also textbooks, anthologies, dictionaries. Every time I moved—seven times in three states—I faithfully boxed, stacked and unpacked them. There were various arrangements for books in the various homes. Several portable bookshelves followed along from place to place.

The first major culling of the collection happened when my children were very small. I decided to build a three-piece bookshelf from a Home Depot kit for the condo we had just purchased and renovated. While the babies slept, I assembled and painted this thing in the garage: white, with a wine-colored background (I’ve always been a fan of the colorful background). And when it came time to unbox the majority of the library that had been stored since the move, I ended up donating about forty percent of the books. I decided that moving forward, I would only keep books I believed I’d have occasion to re-read or reference in the future, or books I loved, either rationally or irrationally. Most of the school-related books went, also, novels for which my feelings were anything less than deep affection or admiration.

Four more moves in about six more years, and the books came along. Of course, the collection grew, even under the new rules for keeping. One house had a built-in office with two tall shelves; another had shelves in the family room. And then, we found the house where I thought I’d be for a very long time. Maybe, for good.

When I moved to this new place last year, it required another reshaping of the collection. Books of my soon-to-be ex-husband’s that had been part of the library for over two decades were boxed and sent his way. In some cases, ownership wasn’t entirely clear but because I was doing all of the labor, I used my best judgement and perhaps took some liberties.

Two weeks before I moved to this home, my home, I got the keys and began slowly moving things over. First on the list: the library. I took many bags to Goodwill. I packed up books that had been on my To Read pile for much too long. I got rid of books for which my affection had waned over the years. I moved box after box to the new house, lined the books up along the walls of my bright, spacious bedroom. And on a sunny day, I paid an installer to put together three new shelves—two for the landing at the top of this second floor, one for the crowded but cozy corner of my bedroom which serves as my office.

This library is a pared-down, leaner, much less concentrated and more mobile version of its former self. On the landing are mostly novels and just two shelves for children’s books from middle grade to present. The picture books and most of the photo albums are stacked in plastic bins in the garage, no room for them here. Next to my desk are literary theory and poetry, spiritual books, history and biography, books on writing, miscellaneous others. My new, smaller To Read pile is probably still too unwieldy.

Downstairs, a glass-enclosed bookshelf houses the coffee table books and a series about art that belonged to my mother. Also, that Disney set from childhood. On this home’s only built-in shelves, above a desk set off from the living room, you’ll find anthologies and collections, leather-bound classics I also brought from my mother’s house when we cleared out her library after she passed last year.

It occurs to me that my library, in its current incarnation, is a spread-out, breathing, but non-permanent thing. I think about a scene from my favorite movie, Moonstruck, when Loretta’s father says the pinky ring her fiancé has given her looks stupid. She says “It’s temporary!” and he fires back “Everything is temporary!” But I like the feeling of having my books settled into places, even if it’s several places, even if perhaps this newest arrangement is also quite temporary. The books are not. They have been with me through everything. They live on their shelves and in me, no matter where we find ourselves next.

Mary Vensel White is a graduate of the University of Denver and DePaul University. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, The Rumpus, The Wisconsin Review, Author Magazine, and other places, and she is a contributing editor at LitChat.com, and owner of TypeEighteenEditing.com. Her debut novel, The Qualities of Wood, was the first book published under HarperCollins’ Authonomy imprint. Her second novel, Bellflower, was published this year. Here’s what Deborah Reed, author of The Days When Birds Come Back, had to say about Bellflower: “A small gem of a novel, each vignette comes as a surprise, and each is a testament to how, just like in life, everything is woven and fused and pulling toward the other.” Mary Vensel White lives in southern California with her four children. Click here to visit her website.

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

When Books Go MIH (Missing in House): One Writer’s Library

Reader:  Lisa Romeo
Location:  Cedar Grove, NJ
Collection Size:  About 1,400
The one book I’d run back into a burning building to rescue:  A fill-in-yourself cookbook of my recipes—because it carries an inscription: “To my daughter, who turned out to be a terrific cook!” This surprised Mom because as she always admitted, she was not a good cook.
Favorite book from childhood:  Every single one that featured a horse. I’ll have to go with National Velvet.
Guilty pleasure book:  Books I only discover after falling in love with the film or TV series the books inspired. Currently, the Call the Midwife memoir trilogy.

I ordered more bookcases last week when I caught myself doing what I vowed I’d never do: piling books on the wing chair I’d confiscated from the living room, claiming I needed a reading chair in my home office. The chair now resembles the basement treadmill—sturdy and parked in a fine spot but rendered useless by its transformation into a holder of stuff. In the chair’s case, it’s books purchased in the past few weeks or those I’d pulled from the shelf for some worthy reason, but when I went to return them to their rightful spot, the spot was gone, overtaken by other books.

I looked around. The chair wasn’t the only warning sign that my home library needed attention.

Piled on a card table were books about fathers and daughters, grief, and death rituals— books I’d read or skimmed last year while writing and revising my recently published memoir, Starting With Goodbye, and/or while writing more about those topics for book publicity months ago. Huh. Thought I’d re-shelved them. The card table itself had been hastily erected as a place to stash other books I’d assigned my online MFA students months ago and needed handy, then promptly forgotten I’d pulled from shelves. Later, I’d go to the appropriate spot, move my index finger along to find one, alphabetically, where it should have been.

Then our son called from college during his first week—as instructed because surely most of the books assigned in his 20th Century American Literature class were on my shelves, saving us both a wad of cash. Instead, I discovered the stash of classics I absolutely know I had somewhere, were apparently elsewhere.

Books are often MIH. Missing, but In the House. Somewhere.

For someone with nearly 100 linear feet of book shelf space, it probably shouldn’t be this way.

Six years ago, the home office/library of my dreams took shape. I did the imagining, my dear husband did the work: painting the walls red, the window trim and door white; measuring, then assembling eight black bookcases; moving a white-and-butcher-block glass-fronted cabinet up from the kitchen. I dislike desks so we floated a black wood dining table in the center of the room so every bit of wall space could be given over to books.

I drafted one son and for two days we organized, alphabetized, and shelved some 1,000 books. All the novels together, followed by short story collections. Then the narrative nonfiction, memoirs, and essay collections by a single author. A separate slim bookcase was devoted to essay anthologies. In the white cabinet: two shelves for poetry, three for books on writing craft, one for language and style reference. Finally, there were two shelves for stuff I’d written myself (before my book), that appeared between physical covers, plus books by editing clients.

Back then, there were empty spaces at the end of many shelves which I filled with mementos, travel trinkets, photos, and Mom’s Waterford candy jars filled with shells and pretty rocks.

It seemed like enough space. So much space, after 23 years working in that same home office with drab hand-me-down, beige office shelving designed to hold anything but books.

It wasn’t enough space.

Slowly, the bits of art and ephemera gave way to newly-acquired books. When all the linear space was full, I began laying books horizontally on top of standing books, then eventually, sadly, stacking books in front of other books. Mind you, each time I get to the end of a 10-week writing class I teach four times a year, I cull the collection, yanking out a dozen books to give away to students. It doesn’t help much.

From where I sit writing in my home office, I watch the light traffic on my suburban street. Recently I tried to think of a week when the UPS van didn’t stop to drop off books, or I didn’t arrive home from a conference, bookstore appearance, or book festival without an armful. No such week existed in my memory. (Some weeks, no such day exists.)

I haven’t even mentioned the bookcases in the breakfast nook holding cookbooks, the one in the living room stacked with travel and local history. Or the baskets in two bathrooms holding trivia and joke books. Or the shelves in the basement where my sons stack books they want to be rid of, awaiting my sorting into bags for the hospice shop, friends with younger children, and book drives.

My fiction shelves are mostly well-behaved; novels rarely go MIH. I read only one novel at a time and return it to its place according to the author’s last name within days. Poetry books and writing craft books don’t generally go missing either but if they did, I wouldn’t realize it right away since I don’t impose alphabetical shelving there. When I want to read a particular poem again, I likely have a vivid memory of the book’s cover and search that way. Craft and writing reference books seem to self-sort into most-consulted at one end of the shelf, and infrequently-thumbed at the other.

What I’m challenged by are the 27 shelves, always full, overflowing, haphazard, holding nonfiction prose, shelves that begin alphabetically but devolve into chaos. I tend to read—or skim, study, search through—about six different nonfiction books at a time. They could be anywhere—in the pool bag, on my night table, in the car, under a pillow on the family room couch. Shelved in the wrong place. I blame not having my glasses handy, ever. Or if I’m tired, I might re-shelve P after R. Put a single-author essay collection on the anthology shelf, drop a memoir by a multi-genre author alongside her novels.

The nonfiction shelves are where at 3:00 a.m. I once decided to reposition some physical shelves, pulled out about 300 books, judged wrong about shelf height, and so now some books are (horrors!) shelved horizontally. It’s where gaps might mean the book is in a pile meant for research or teaching. The nonfiction shelves are also where I’m perplexed by a “missing” title until I realize I meant to buy it, thought I bought it, but didn’t (yet) buy it.

I did find all the classic novels that my college son called about (okay, two weeks too late), neatly stacked (though behind several trophies) in a bookcase in the elder son’s room, where of course I’d suggested he keep them until his brother needed them. Shouldn’t they be back in my office? Of course. Alas, where to put them and the 50-odd other currently shelf-less books?

First, I consult my husband, whose regular job demands he organize a sizable wholesale warehouse for maximum storage and efficiency. How, dear, can we cram in more shelves, more books? He pulls out the measuring tape and yes, we can squeeze one of the narrowest, tallest bookshelves between the window and the closet door, and another next to the wing chair.

But honey, he said ever so gently, you don’t really have a bookshelf problem. You have a book-buying problem.

How could I explain? I don’t have a book-buying problem. I have a library.

Lisa Romeo is the author of Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love after Loss (University of Nevada Press). Her short work is listed in Best American Essays 2018 and 2016, and has appeared in the New York Times, O The Oprah Magazine, Longreads, Brevity, Under the Gum Tree, and many other places. Lisa teaches with the Bay Path University MFA program and earned her MFA from Stonecoast. Connect on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or at her website.

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

Living With My Books: A Bookseller’s Library

Reader:  Barbara Theroux
Location:  Missoula, Montana
Collection Size:  Averages 2,000.  It’s a fluid collection: books come in and are donated to grandchildren, the university, and the Missoula Public Library.
The one book I'd run back into a burning building to rescue:  It’s actually four books. Two books “created and bound” by my sons when they were in third grade and two journals created on trips to Disneyland in 1982 and The East Coast in 1984
Favorite book from childhood:  Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
Guilty pleasure book:  As a bookseller, there were several customers that would always request “airplane reading” those books that you can escape into on a flight, my suggestions were always mysteries. Guess I have Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie to thank for that reading tradition. Joe Pickett, Walt Longmire, Sean Stranahan, Erin Murphy, and Lola Wicks are current characters that give me pleasure.

I have been surrounded by books all my life. In the 1950s, Little Golden Books were the beginning of my personal library; my mother could buy these treasures at the grocery store. As a librarian she knew the importance of reading to children. Not only were books in our home, but I had my own books and bookshelf. Early books that I purchased with my own money at Woolworth’s were in the popular series titles featuring Donna Parker, Trixie Belden, and Nancy Drew.

Libraries were also an important part of my childhood, especially useful to explore topics of interest like ship disasters. One summer I went through the pages of history as I read about the Titanic, the Andrea Doria, and the Lusitania. With library books I did not have to clear room on my bookshelves, but I did have a special spot to keep them so that I did not forget to return them on time. I continued to work in and volunteer in school and public libraries all my life. Today I am president of Friends of Missoula Public Library and have served on many committees working on the new library.

In the late 1960s, my summer employer was Doubleday and Co. The publisher had a bindery and shipping center in my hometown of Hanover, Pennsylvania. This was the center of The Literary Guild and various other book clubs. Working on the assembly lines, gave me insight into how a book is made. It also gave me incentive to complete my college education. At least once a month, employees could purchase damaged books for twenty-five cents apiece. Many times I came home from work with a backseat full of current books.

I graduated with an education degree with a school library certification. This took me to a junior high school library in Pendleton, Oregon. From there I moved to Moscow, Idaho, and went to work in the public library. In 1971, I accepted a position as trade book buyer at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Being a book buyer at two university stores and later a bookstore owner gave me an introduction to another side of the book business. One full of catalogs, advance reading copies and opportunities to meet authors (and add signed books to my personal library). The decades of bookselling greatly increased my personal library and started my sons’ libraries as well.

This bookshelf holds some of my favorite titles. There is even one Doubleday damaged book, Five Smooth Stones, among the advanced reading copies, signed copies and many Montana Book Award titles.

In addition to acquiring books throughout my life, I had to learn to downsize my collection. Over the years I have donated to various library book sales, the University of Montana President’s home library, established home libraries for my grandchildren, and added to Little Free Libraries at my apartment and across town. My bookshelves also display travel mementos, family photographs and other collections. I now life in a 750-square-foot double-loft apartment where my books surround me but still allow room to entertain friends, family and occasionally host a book club.

This built-in piece of furniture provides a good place to house some of my signed editions.

My travel bookcase not only contains travel guides and books from destinations, but a collection of photos and empty beverage containers from most of the countries I have visited. My travels have taken me to Romania, Hungary, Korea, Russia, China, Cuba and Kenya. The Kenyan kiondo holds a collection of books by Kenyan authors and those which are set in Kenya. One of my sons was in the Peace Corps and spent three years teaching in Kenya where he met his wife. I have traveled to Kenya several times and love having family to visit there.

Now that I am retired from bookselling, I still purchase books and obtain advance reading copies for the next phase of my life with books, becoming a blogger. Book Bound with Barbara began one year ago and is evolving (which is a polite way to say I am still exploring how I want to talk about books).

My office (above) and reading corner (below) show stacks of books, some divided into month of publication or category such as young adult. It is an ever-changing landscape!

Barbara Theroux retired in 2017, giving her time to read the books she accumulated over the 45 years of bookselling. In 1986, she opened Fact & Fiction in downtown Missoula, giving her many years of book events, customers, authors and experiences in creative bill-paying. She still volunteers with the Montana Book Festival, Montana Book Award, and the Missoula Public Library but loves to travel especially to see her grandchildren. These days her opinions can be found at BookBoundWithBarbara.blogspot.com

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.