My own shelves
are organized aesthetically. Books appear to be grouped by subject and genre,
however, they are really grouped by the emotions I attach to the books. Nobody
else could find anything, but if you pushed all thousand-plus titles onto the
floor and mixed them up, I would be able to methodically put each one back in
its original place.
If I was away
and you needed to find a specific title, I could call you and tell you the
specific shelf and position on the shelf where you could find it. Very OCD (or CDO
– which is OCD in the right order), but I have a tremendous attachment to the
books I now retain.
I once had over
three thousand books in the library, including a big collection of signed first
editions. That got split in half in one of those life partings which see
possessions cut in half with an emotional chainsaw.
In some ways,
losing half of what I considered my
library was a big help to me. It delivered a strong blow to my obsessive
collector tendencies, and made me think about what it was I really wanted from a
personal library. I realized it should not simply be a collection of books
without any strong connection to the individual who assemble the tomes on the
shelves – it needed to be a living, changing, reflection of the individual
collector.
As a result, I
ended up whittling down my half of the original library to only those books to
which I had an emotional connection. I lost all interested in signed first
editions, which to be of value must only have a signature without any
personalization. I also came to realized as I grew intellectually, matured
emotionally, and changed life perspective, my personal library needed to change
as well. I realize this perspective will be seen as blasphemy by many,
including a number of personal friends whose collections go back to the first
books they bought for themselves. To each their own…
However, acting
on my epiphany has seen the books in my library settle in consistently at
around 800 titles, but which have change almost completely three or four times
in the past twenty-five years. There is still a core of about 200 books which are
permanent entries, but all the rest are fair game to be swapped out for
something different.
I do not seek
signed copies any more unless I have a personal connection to a book or its
author – for instance, I have signed copies of all the paperbacks from the Fight Card series I edited…and will
always keep. I also have a signed copy of The
Razor's Edge with which I will never part because of how the book came into
my possession and how much that particular story has affected my life.
I have also
turned my collection into a readers' library. I prefer books that have been
cared for, yet well read. They are not monetarily valuable in the least, but
they have a priceless emotional history I can actually feel. I know that sounds
wacky, but none-the-less it works for me. There isn't a book on my shelves I
haven't read, where as before, when the tomes numbered in the thousands, over
half had never been read and were simply sitting on the shelves to fulfill a
compulsion.
For a number of
years now, I've felt the current incarnation of my library was pretty static. In
reality, it didn't change because I wasn't changing. I needed the stability of
the titles I knew and kept there on the shelves waiting and comforting.
However, recently, I have started to have an inkling a fairly large number of
certain titles were telling me they expected to continue their journey
from my shelves to elsewhere.
In much the
same way, I sometimes feel like a well-worn title in a confined collection –
pushing myself further and further to the edge of the shelf – caught between
fear of freefall and the exhilaration of new growing experiences.
As this time
for a gentle library purge approaches, I have been running my fingers down the well-worn spines
of friends, recognizing it is okay for them to immigrate to new homes and
collections. I also know there are other worn paperbacks and slightly battered
hardcovers waiting for me to discover them and take them in…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Novelist, screenwriter, and
television personality, Paul Bishop spent 35 years with the Los Angeles Police
Department, where he was twice honored as Detective of the Year. He continues to work privately as an interrogation and deception
expert. His fifteen novels include five in his LAPD Homicide Detective Fey
Croaker series. His latest novel, Lie Catchers, begins a new series featuring
top LAPD interrogators Ray Pagan and Calamity Jane Randall.
* AMAZON * LIE CATCHERS *
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