Shelf Life

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #184. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Interfacing in the millennium.

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Booksellers tend to be book hoarders. This isn’t an insult; this is a fact. A coworker of mine, infamously, has been sleeping on his couch for years because his bed is covered in books. Another has turned her garage into a library. Compared to my peers, I feel ascetic. I don’t particularly like buying books I haven’t read. I don’t buy books that are in bad shape or falling apart. I’m not easily seduced by first editions or special printings. I am an easy sell on reference books; I reference them rarely. Occasionally a vintage book will catch my eye: The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation, Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads, James Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks. I have so few of these that I don’t know where to put them; they tend to wander. This is all to clarify that I consider myself at least moderately discerning; I don’t have books just for books’ sake.

But I do still have a lot of books. I have a lot more than I’ve ever had before. I realized this mid-move, seeing the low wall of boxes I’d created around myself. This isn’t a problem I’m used to having; I’m not a stuff person. I spent my teenage years moving on my own. I have, more than once, packed my life in a suitcase and a backpack and just… gone somewhere else, for a long time. It has always felt wise to be mobile. How much do I really need, anyway? For a while I was thinking about grad school. Why would I buy books when I might move to Malta? I’d just have to leave them behind.

At some point I stopped following this logic. At some point I bought more books than I could in good conscience put in a box or give away. I think that was an expression of great trust, on my part, in the life I live now. I did it by accident. I don’t know how I feel about it. I am a bit worried that I’ve betrayed myself. That I’ve committed some extreme act of naiveté that will come back to bite me in the ass. The little fears say it’s asking for trouble to have more than you can carry.

And yet I’m still buying books. I like them; they make me happy. I enjoy looking at my shelves and knowing that I made them that way. Everything is there because I want it, because I like it, because it spoke to me once or because I want it to speak to me in the future. I think if I died tomorrow, you’d get a good idea of who I was by looking at my books. The things I like about myself are in there. You can tell who I am from the order they’re in (alphabetized by author, duh), from their position on the shelves (spines aligned, about an inch back from the shelves) and from the space between them (enough to hold each other up, to stay straight, but not enough to prevent easy removal). And you can probably tell who I am from the books themselves. In fiction: contemporary horror, speculative fiction, books in translation, interspersed by classics that are tabbed but not annotated. In nonfiction: books on architecture, urbanism, queer theory, European history. There are collections: Harlan Ellison, the barbed-tongue petty king of New Wave science fiction, who sparred with Sinatra over his choice in footwear. Every professionally published Paul Simon biography, lyric book, and Rolling Stone cover, as well as a petulantly signed Art Garfunkel memoir. Vintage/Otto Penzler “Big Book Of…” anthologies, as many as fit on a shelf. A small but brave showing of Angus & Robertson’s Australian Classics, before I realized the extent that the quality deteriorated after the original run in the early seventies. Every Hellboy omnibus. Every slutty Elric DAW paperback. Every Nero Wolfe book, in rancid shape. These are the things I like irrationally.

It’s just that now there’s a weight to them. I don’t mean physical, though god knows those boxes were heavy. It feels spiritual. I think that in moving them from one home to another I have conceded their importance, which means that if I were to leave them behind, I would be missing some part of me, which means that, if I am being honest with myself, my days of flight are over. For the first time in my adult life, I am probably not going to go anywhere. I am not a month away from another adventure. I am not going to leave everyone I know, check my life in a bag, and become someone else somewhere else for a while. The impulse to do these things has not gone away; when my life is hard and I feel bad it is always my first instinct to leave. I have spent a lot of time and energy fighting that. It is an adventurous way to live but it is lonely and unstable. It is good, I think, that I have given up the safety blanket and let my life get larger. I have family close by. I have friends, the same friends I had five years ago, which isn’t something I’ve ever had before. I have a pleasant job and a beautiful apartment and a life that’s the same day to day, a life that isn’t going to disappear in ten months when I take myself away from it. And I have books.

My god, do I have books.

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Maddi Chilton is an internet artifact from St. Louis, Missouri. Follow her on Bluesky.