Where Have All the Books Gone?

When I was a kid, I had a loft bed and under it I built my first library. In high school I filled that library with Folger Shakespeare paperbacks, Signet editions of novels by Dickens and the Br?nte sisters, Fawcett paperbacks of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories, murder mysteries by Agatha Christie and any number of science and fantasy trilogies.

This is how a personal library is born, and over the years, that library mushroomed in size, occupying an ever-increasing number of self-built bookshelves that traveled with me from home to home.

As you can no doubt tell, I love books, and you probably do, too—how they look, how they feel in your hands, how they smell when newly bought and cracked open, even the sound they make as pages are turned.

This will not be another eulogy to the book’s death by digital device. I don’t have a dog in that fight and I’ve become pretty much print-digital agnostic in my reading experience. What I document here is not a change in my relationship to the individual book but to the personal library.

For decades, I traveled with bookcases, and my last set of shelves were large, uneven and clumsily built. They stood seven feet high and occupied some 56 cubic feet of space in my living room. It took a few decades, but it was time for a change, for something more permanent and pleasant to look at. Also, crazy as it sounds, death by bookcase a la Howard’s End had become an actual concern.

Enter the book tablet. Its birth was rocky, and I was there when it was born (and so were you, most likely). It was only a matter of time before the proper device, with the proper software, the proper content, and the proper business model would come along and sweep all before it. This is the world of the KindleFire, the Nook, the iPad, the Droid, and countless other smart devices, and it is the world we now live in. That world has granted us new choices. So here’s a choice I made when personal history, a permanent bookcase, a frustrated spouse, and my reluctant embrace of e-reading came together.

The first thing you need to understand is that filling a new bookcase means emptying an old one. As book after book sat in neat rows across floors and my dining room table, the thought occurred: do I really want all these books? Lifelong habit said yes. But habits can change when a proper substitute comes along. Think smoking patch

My patch took the form of the complete works of Charles Dickens for $0.99.

There it was. For less than $1.00, I could have on the device that I tucked in with at night, with the screen glare turned low and no need to turn on the night stand light so my wife could sleep undisturbedly, the complete works of George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy, William Makepeace Thackeray, Willa Cather, Anthony Trollope, Jane Austen, and Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Br?nte. All of them out of copyright, all of them in English. And if I were willing to lower the bar and tolerate the archaisms of older translations, there were the complete works of Guy de Maupassant, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and assorted others. But why stop at literature? For under a buck each I could explore the complete dialogs of Plato, the histories and treatises of David Hume, the meditations of Descartes, and thunderous proclamations of Nietzche. 

Of course, there were print items I was not going to give up so quickly: Norton critical editions of Turn of the Screw and The Awakening; beautifully bound Library of America printings of Twain and Melville; the Kent State University definitive edition of Charles Brockden Brown’s writings.  But the 6-point font Signet edition of Henry Fieldings’ Tom Jones? When there is an adjustable font setting on my Kindle? That is not a hard choice to make with my middle-aged eyesight.

Once upon a time, I preened with the pride of the over-read, flaunting that row of Dickens novels on my shelves. But such feelings seem, well, quaint in age of tiny houses and paperless offices.  More concretely, when the spirit comes upon me to revisit an old classic—Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim or George Eliot’s Silas Marner—the idea of grabbing a much-yellowed paperback that I perpetually forget to bookmark or can’t read at night unless I decamp to another room or fear cracking the spine of has lost its grip. Now I have one library in my house and another in the digital ether.

So where have all the books gone? Gone to my new bookshelves—material and digital—every one.