When I closed out my bookstore a few years ago, it was like shutting down an orphanage. The children, my used books, still presented a problem. Although my husband is a shelf-building fool, we could absorb only so many books at our house. During the book dispersal, I discovered something interesting and at the same time disturbing about myself: my decision-making capability is a depletable resource. When I began to dither in confusion I realized I had to stop, for days or more often weeks, and let the well of decision-making capability fill up again. Some books were easier to part with than others.
I required time to reflect on the provenance of some books. Tobias Wolff had signed my copy of The Barracks Thief in 1986. Tony Hillerman's signed pocket paperbacks could go easily, but Wolff's was a trade paperback, which somehow complicated the decision, even though the pages were yellow and brittle. Should I keep the book club copy of Davita's Harp that Chaim Potok had signed? Was the memory of meeting him at Utah State University enough?
Some books I had to read or at least skim to the end, or look at the pictures. Some I could part with, but for some reason had to make a photocopy of a drawing, or the cover (go figure).
I played little split personality games with myself, employing my left brain to talk to the right: You may keep only one of these two, m'dear; which will it be? You may only keep three linear feet, or whatever will fit on a shelf, from these six boxes. Not one more. No, no. No books on top of the row of books; and no shelving double-deep. You may not covert the house to hamster trails. No, no, no. None in the knee walls where they will only tempt the carpenter ants. You do not need most fiction. Reference books are more important. The runs of ISLE and Creative Nonfiction can go to the library, where they will be perfectly safe.
My mantra became: You can go to the library. You don't have to own every book. This sounds like a solution, but it was not a solution really, because I owned some good books that had been discarded by the local library. And if they discarded them, I reasoned, chances are every other library has discarded them as well. Old science classics, by my old and mostly late professors, would surely be needed at some point to document the change in science teaching over the years. They were of historical significance. What if someone (me?) was to need to write an article on Allen Stokes, for instance, and was desperate for his dogeared laboratory manual on animal behavior? The most effective left-brain phrase for my emotional self was: You have come to a halt, Gretchen (my mother sometimes called me that). Frozen solid. These old books are preventing you from moving forward to new books, thus new experiences.
Various Friends of the Library groups took away lots of books. Artists took art books (difficult to shelve, anyway). Science fiction, women's studies, and true crime (not my favorites) sold cheaply, by the pound, on Ebay. Nate Carpenter of PaleoPublications in Idaho took boxes and boxes of old anthropology, geology, science and medical books. When I started asking Nate to return certain books, that was a signal to both of us that I should stop shipping. Signed first edition novels essentially had no takers, although I tried. Pristine-looking, dust jackets in mylar, they went to a couple of library collections and as a gift to a young bibliophile I took a shine to. I also gave him my extra copy of A Gentle Madness. His wife seemed okay with it. The German chemistry reference set was claimed by a small college in California when I advertised on the American Chemical Society website (someone had suggested I make lamp bases from them--horrors!), and I sent my children's books to my old elementary school.
The poetry collection presented a dilemma. Poetry books are odd things, often difficult to shelve because of their flimsiness, odd sizes, deckled edges, special paper. The paperbacks tend to warp. I gave essentially all the poetry books, and poetry commentary, to the University of Arizona Poetry Center. The UA is my alma mater, and I figured they were obliged to me. I wrote a note of apology. I just cannot sort these, I said. I am sending all. You will need to look through and determine which ones are useful to you. They thanked me for being a significant donor to their growing collection, and exhibited some of the books I had sent.
I allowed myself a shelf of poetry. I kept Dad's Robert Service to remember Dad reciting "The Spell of the Yukon." I kept the western poets David Lee, May Swenson, Sharlot Hall and William Stafford. I kept Bill Holm. I kept the nature poets Mary Oliver and Pattiann Rogers, and science poet Ralph Lewin. I kept Carole Oles' poems about the astronomer Maria Mitchell. I have met Lee, Swenson, Stafford, Holm, Oliver, Rogers, and Oles, and I've corresponded with Lewin, who has a zany sense of humor. I kept a few anthologies. I kept Martin Fierro: The Gaucho, that I bought in Argentina. I kept a couple of how-to books on writing poetry.
To date, I have not had poetry withdrawal, or lack-of-poetry panic. I have actually written a bad poem or two. I put my quilting books upstairs by the sewing machine, and I've made a few nice quilts. The book diaspora has given me breathing room and allowed movement forward. I was at the library just today, and every month a package or two comes from Amazon with something particularly intriguing that I must own. If the book I've ordered is disappointing, I quickly make the decision to pass it on.
The annual Sewanee Writers Conference is a good place to find new poets to love, and this year I discovered many good to excellent poets, but I bought only books by Brad Leithauser and Eric McHenry. Leithauser, I've discovered in years past, writes poems that speak to me, and if his book is also illustrated by his brother (see the cover above), Mark, I get a double treat.
I bought McHenry's collection because I loved hearing him read, particularly "The Wheelhouse," the final poem in Potscrubber Lullabies. It begins:
The house corrects its course each time I ease
the swan's-neck faucet four or five degrees...
and later,
...there's nothing left to do/except the dishes. I turn on the cold
and hear the cargo shifting in the hold.
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