Losing an afternoon organising bookshelves
It can start with a sudden need to find a particular title, or when edging into place the recently read. Among the shelves, concentration immediately departs for another room. Books are shuffled and stroked, pulled from their berths to leave gaps in the shelf’s gums, and dangerous thoughts begin: shouldn’t this be over there, with his others? Surely all poetry should be together? Why are travelogues mixed in with travel guides? What was I thinking?
Some shifting begins. The odd errant, half-read masterpiece of a biography is retrieved from its horizontal mooring by atlases and dictionaries, turned upright, and placed among a small muster of other life stories across the room. That would be that, except your eyes have fallen upon a bygone title, which must now be grabbed and encountered. Everything is I forgot I had this! and Where the hell’s the sequel gone?, the latter stirring a search. In that one act of rehousing a biography, you have become a chess piece moved around by a hundred Grand Masters of paper, ink and card.
The chain continues. Lost and found, connections made, serendipitous rediscoveries. Books are held and considered reverentially almost as if they may at any point begin to speak. Their maturing can be observed: dusty scents, amber leafs, warps and bows, and the many niggles and nobbles of advancing age. Blurbs and back covers are scanned once more, their persuasive ways charming anew, and throwing a wave back to the you that bought and read this book in times and places long ago. The typeface, chapter headings, characters, illustrations or mere feel of the object momentarily bring not only the book back to life, but the person who read it. And then you spot something else.
Time has, most likely, ceased to matter. Hours become irrelevant. Surrounding you on the floor are book piles that resemble rock formations, crumbling Roman pillars and staircases to nowhere. Deliberately or not, it appears that the shelves are being reorganised. The chaotic librarian in you proceeds. A system is concocted: half-alphabet, half-oh-that’ll-fit-there; nothing too foolproof, nothing that will prevent this shambolic bliss from occurring again in a few years’ time. Volumes are escorted to their new lodgings, clacking like clogs on cobbles as they land.
Finally, after this house clearance in reverse, the job is done. Now comes the moment to sit surveying your multicoloured army of straight-backed soldiers, and the moment to realise that you never did find the book you were searching for.