When moving house and cities some years ago there was a conspicuous absence in so many of the potential homes we inspected – bookshelves.
And where there are no bookshelves it usually means there are few books. It was as if, when styling homes for potential sale, the real estate agents had issued strict instructions: whatever you do, make sure there are no damn books about.
The rule was not absolute. It did not apply to the atlas-sized pictorial book of Hamptons beach houses or English gardens or Aztec iconography left casually on the coffee table. Just the way another, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, reposed challengingly uncooked-from on the stone kitchen bench beside a bowl of persimmon and the flickering sandalwood candle.
Books, in this situation, were presented as cultural-social artefacts, curated to denote and connote aspiration and cultivated taste.
The look was minimalistic, of course. And if minimalism has an archenemy – sort of a Marie Kondo kryptonite if you like – it is loads of books and their shelves.
So it was that the first thing we did after moving into our new Sydney place was have 70-plus metres of bookshelves installed. The shelves in the study, which is where I mostly write – and often just think about it – with my dogs, are now three-deep with books. They are on almost every other surface too, and now in cardboard boxes by the door.
Needless to say, I love books.
And I think they love me too, the way they seem to track me down via publicists (thank you all for so many reasons), through the push-marketing of rare volume auction houses (I can’t resist the lucky-dips of those catalogues with offerings such as shelf of Australiana – bidding starts at $30; click) and gifts from dear mates and family who know what I might like.
Of course there are also the books that especially move me and then buy numerous copies of (most recently Perceval Everett’s The Trees, Robin Robertson’s wondrous prose-poem The Long Take and Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses) so that I can give them to those I care about and, so, perhaps share the emotional movement they gave me.
On average, I’d say, three or four new books (some are very old but just new to me) make their way into the study weekly. Far fewer leave. Yes, we have a housing crisis. But what should go?
My dog-eared, pencil-annotated Great Expectations or Far from the Madding Crowd that I studied for HSC lit 42 years ago? I still reread them every decade or so. Melville’s Moby-Dick? I’ve read it twice and am unlikely to do so again (it’s a challenging favourite but it reminds me now of the first pandemic lockdown when I last read it), although I did dip into it again to inform an anecdote in the novel I’m writing.
I am a big-time “dipper’’ into our home library.
When news of Martin Amis’s death touched me one weekend the other month, for example, I bolted to the study and eventually found his Experience, my favourite literary memoir. I spent the day dipping in and out of it, emailing and texting lines to writer mates. And then I spent the next week rereading The Information, his savagely comic novel about literary envy.
Since a friend introduced me to James Salter through his Light Years a few months ago, I’ve been steadily buying (secondhand – in some cases for less than the price of a weekend newspaper) his back catalogue. I use – and love – libraries too, though more often for research, nonfiction and reference books than novels.
I was talking to a writer friend the other day about the books/housing crisis at my place. He has the same problem.
He said: “My relatives, who’ll get everything when I go, aren’t readers at all. I imagine they’ll throw all the books in a skip and be done with it.”
In contrast, my extended family are big readers and may want some of what we leave behind in the study one day. But I think I’m going to start giving the books away before then and necessarily at a greater rate than we acquire them.
I mentioned the boxes of books at the door of my study. I’ve been going through them, a little melancholically, these past few days. They were given to me this year by a very dear mate.
Many of the books he left me are rare and old (a complete collection of Charles Bean’s 12-volume The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918 and early edition Australian, British and translated Russian “classics’” among them). I’ll never read all of those 12 volumes, though I have reads bits of some while researching my own books.
The classics, I will, and think of him when I do. But the immediate challenge is where to house them. I’m thinking that for every new arrival, two that we haven’t read for a decade must depart.
But what if I miss them when they’re gone, when I have that sense, like a nagging itch, of absolutely needing to reread that passage from a novel or that weird 1950s anthropology tome or that book about my football team or the history of Australian surfing?
I can probably make a little room yet.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
