I settled into my Sydney work room eight years ago and immediately had many metres of shelves built to accommodate all the books we’d moved cities with and all those that would come in the years ahead.
Within a few years the shelves were groaning with the many hundreds that had made their way into the house by various means. I love my local bookshops and rarely a week passes when I don’t buy at least one. And then there are the many I’m sent by publishers and other authors for prospective review or just because, and the proofs for endorsement. Add to that the many that my partner is sent and the ones we are given and then, of course, those I can’t walk past at street libraries, which I also love, and we have … a massive bookshelf problem.
They were stacked three-deep in the shelves, others were pushed horizontally into gaps above the rows. There were piles on the corner of my desk. Teetering mounds on the mantelpiece and on chairs.
For a bookish person this seemed, in some ways, appropriate. The problem was there was no order at all. We couldn’t find anything we wanted or needed without pulling dozens of books out and mostly never putting them back.
Where was that brilliant Martin Amis autobiography, Experience, that I needed to reach for (yet again; it’s my all-time favourite memoir by an author) after I learned of his death? Didn’t we have a biography and memoir section? Can’t find that any more! Maybe it’s with his novels then? But they’re buried in there somewhere behind two other rows. It took several hours. It shouldn’t have been that hard.
Something had to change. And, so, the cull began in earnest.
What to surrender to a charity donation and what to keep is a vexing dilemma.
Keepers include pretty much anything signed by someone known to us or written by friends. That’s a lot. And then there are the all-time favourites – including special books from our childhoods and others that were seminal to understanding the world and the transformative, magical alchemy of reading and writing. We may never read them again. But parting with them seems, somehow, like the erasure of dear memories.
What about signed books that we know we will never read again? Like a first edition of Norman Mailer’s The Time of Our Time? An early Thea Astley?
For a few years I developed an addiction to online auctions of “classic” books, including Australian first editions. And so, I had multiple first edition copies of, for example, George Johnston’s Miles Franklin-winning My Brother Jack and The Sponge Divers, written in collaboration with his wife, Charmian Clift. These I’ve put aside as gifts.
Meanwhile, I’ve amassed (kind of by accident through writing a sort of gonzo history around an element of the first world war, and due to my interest in Anzac mythology) a considerable collection of military history, most of which I’ll never again open. Some of it has gone to charity, while much of the rest is in the TBC (to be considered) pile.
But I will keep a full first-edition 12-volume set of Charles Bean’s Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, still in their cardboard packaging, given to me by a dear friend before he died 18 months ago.
Through purge, meanwhile, emerges discovery. I was excited to find two more Jenny Erpenbeck novels that my partner read years ago and had recommended but which I’d been unable to locate (during the purge I’d been reading Erpenbeck’s brilliant Kairos). They are now part of my summer reading, along with a couple of novels given by friends a while ago, but which had been misplaced in the bibliophile’s breakfast of my study.
We took many hundreds of books to a charity that re-sells them. But a few kept coming the other way courtesy not least, of those street libraries. I just couldn’t walk past an early edition of Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm (which I’ve not read) and Louise Kennedy’s beautiful, haunting Trespasses (my own copy, signed by her at Adelaide Writers Week, has never boomeranged – but I can’t recall who borrowed it; if you’re reading this, let’s swap?).
Still, right now, having dusted the shelves, reordered the remaining books and discovered some anew, far fewer feels like a whole lot more.
I think, in coming years, I’m going to start giving away most of the books I love but that I suspect I’ll not read again. In the hands and minds of others that feels like a worthwhile bequest.
But I reckon I’ve got at least one more reading of Moby-Dick in me. And I need to try Ulysses – yet again. And William Boyd’s wonderful (signed) Any Human Heart, I seem to re-read every two years or so.
They’ll be with me for a while yet.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
