The Pre-NY's Clean Up

The new year is approaching and so, bored out of my mind I decided to rearrange the books.

I should have taken some photos during the process - when there were books going up the stairs and me up to me cloxters (sp?) in Beckett.

Here is the first snap. One bookshelf uses a heavenly quirky system.

First shelf: The bible under the lost books of the bible and Colin Wilson's The Occult. Random serious thinkers like Emerson,Kahil Gibran, Nietsche, and Rabelais. Complex scientific books, chess strategy books, Philip K. Dick, the letters of Mozard, biographies on Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. A book on art.

Second shelf: Greek mythology, Plato's The Symposium, 3 Volume set of Gibbon's Roman Empire, erotica like Bataille's L'Histoire d'Oeil, Rimbaud, Blake, and Shakespeare.

Third shelf: sadly only three volumes by African authors and then starts the hugenormous American lit section breaking at Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn and continuing on the fourth shelf with Miller's Rosy Cruxification. The fourth shelf gets us past Vonnegut and Wharton and ends with Tobias Wolfe.

Fifth shelf: pretty much starts with Beckett and Joyce with a few other Irish authors in between before going into English lit with Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy sitting comfortably next to a few volumes of Chesterton.

Sixth shelf continues where the fifth stopped adding Gerald and Lawrence Durrell, Philip Larkin, and Pound's ABC of Reading. The sixth shelf also gets to bear the burden of my Somerset Maugham obsession. I have a stunning set of his short stories printed by Folio Society which can be a bit hard to get your hands on, a pleuthora of paperbacks including The Moon and Sixpence (my second favorite of his works after The Razor's Edge) and a first addition of his Writer's Notebook, which was a birthday gift from someone extremely sexy to me. I mean dear.

Seventh shelf has a bit of English including my budding collection of Evelyn Waugh. So far I've collected his diaries, the complete collection of his short stories, Put Out More Flags, and A Little Learning.

The rest of the shelf has a mix of European authors such as Hamsun, Kundera, Strindberg, and Sebald.

By the time I was tired and feeling much less motivated. Since I decided to organize by type of literature I still had: Russian, Asian, French, and loads of biographies, oversized books, and odd one offs like a book on Jack the Ripper. Where does one keep the Ripper?

As you can see, I also don't have enough shelf space. In my perfect world, one of the things I would require to be perfect would be bookshelves. They would never be too shallow for bigger books or too deep for littler ones. As you can see the problem with the second bookshelf was that it's far too deep for paperbacks.

The top has the most room, so the most books. Over half the shelf is various Asian literature including (drum roll please)...All the books from Mishima's Sea of Fertility (Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel)! Soseki, Murakami, and a little known book called The Gay Genius. The little chunk left is stacked with Russian and Latin American/Hispanic Literature, including my new favorite Unamuno and my old favorite Asturias.

The rest of the shelf isn't worth taking about except a few great memoirs (The Words, Jean Paul Sartre and Rodin's On Art and Artists).

Still, I got the job done.

Then I thought, why not further refine the system?

But only for a second. I did go through and pull out books I wanted to remember to read, but I'm not touching a thing otherwise!