Books Before Furniture

We didn’t have a stove yet. The refrigerator was on order. We had no bed, only a mattress on the floor. We furnished the living room with white wire patio chairs we’d bought for $5 a piece at an end-of-summer sale that left grid-marks on the backs of my thighs.

Our new house was nearly empty. But we had books.

At first, we improvised. We stacked the books in piles to form end tables. We "filed" them on kitchen countertops. They leaned against walls.

My husband wrote a popular daily newspaper column back then and a regional magazine wanted to run a story about "the columnist's home," a local take on the "why I live where I live" feature that was popular in Esquire Magazine at the time. I remember a phone conversation with the magazine writer in which I tried to explain that we had just moved in and there was nothing to see here. Could we push it back a couple months? He said he wasn't writing for Architectural Digest and it would be fine. I recognized the desperation of a journalist with a looming deadline fearful his subject was about to pull the plug. We set up a time for him to come over.

As a joke, I placed a tiny Barbie doll-size refrigerator and stove in our kitchen. The reporter looked at them and said, "But how do you cook?" I explained, again, that we'd just moved in. We had a coffee maker and a toaster. Until that moment, I think the reporter thought I was exaggerating and because I felt embarrassed my house was not Homes and Gardens material. In fact, my house was not yet a home.

It was more akin to a library without a Dewey Decimal System, a library we could sleep in.

One of the first things we did was pay a friend with carpentry skills to build bookcases. He covered three walls of one room with floor-to-ceiling shelves. I spent several weeks hand-brushing oil-based paint on the wood planks until my head hurt. Not sure those paints are even legal any more.

I remember a guy at the neighborhood hardware store warned me that oil paints took just short of forever to dry. He recommended we not place anything on the shelves for at least two weeks. After one week we got impatient and shelved a few books.

Those books left a little ink behind that remains today. But at least we weren't tripping over titles.

At the time, I couldn’t imagine we’d ever fill the bookshelves. We’ve since filled, emptied, and refilled those shelves more times than I’ve tracked. We have a popular secondhand bookstore in our city that will buy your old books for a fraction of their original cover cost. A lovely literary hardback that cost $27 would typically get you $2 cash or $4 in credit. We'd go in with a dolly full of cardboard boxes of books, determined to take the cash, and we'd sheepishly exit with a handful of new titles.

Those same books would be deemed virtually worthless on our next visit.

I always felt as if I was walking into a car dealership run by a particularly shark-ish sales staff with a sign on my back that read SUCKER.

More recently, we’ve tried to leave some breathing space between titles, adding treasured mementos, framed prints, baby shoes, the toy royal carriage from my husband’s British childhood.

The titles are arranged, more or less, alphabetically by author. There are loosely defined areas for fiction and non-fiction, shelves of oversized books, two shelves of children’s books for two daughters long-grown, and a shelf devoted to books bought but not yet read.

At times I’ve tried arranging shelves by color. White book jackets next to a white vase, a free promotional white ceramic saltine cracker, and a plastic cell phone box that I, in a moment of artistic delusion, decided looked like a mini Louise Nevelson sculpture in white.

I’ve read and written in that room surrounded by books. I’ve lulled babies with the gentle sing-song of picture books pulled from its shelves. On rainy days, I’ve pored over nearly forgotten photography books, searched pages for passages of favorite novels, and touched the inked signatures of William Styron, Maxine Hong Kingston, John Fowles, Toni Morrison and others as though my fingers might absorb something of what those authors mean to me.

Despite my occasional Marie Kondo flare-ups, I enjoy being surrounded by books and things that spark no joy when it comes to dusting.

I use the public library more often these days. I prefer audio books to give my eyes a rest. It's also handy to listen to stories while walking through the neighborhood so I don't become a total book slug which is like a bookworm that is less active.

But I can’t stop buying books.