merging and purging

April 14th, 2017

In honor of National Library Week, which is almost over, here is a post about books. Hol and I have kept our books separate until now. But ten years in, it seemed time to organize, cull, and merge them. There were piles of books everywhere, and it was impossible to find anything. It was a big project. For the most part our libraries were very complementary—Hol has large swaths of botany, natural history, poetry, and Jung. I have more fiction, memoir, lit crit, and Freud. But there were a few points of overlap:

In these cases, one of us had to give up a book. I had signed copies of Sarah Schulman’s Girls, Visions, and Everything, and Judith Katz’s Running Fiercely from a High, Thin Sound. Hol had a signed Howl. So we’re giving away the unsigned ones.

For some reason we had three Moosewoods between us. We kept the one with the most notes and food spatters in it. Neither of us could part with our Hero With a Thousand Faces, or A Room of One’s Own. Or The Brothers Karamazov. I never read it, but it’s my dad’s Modern Library edition. Hol read it, and can’t let go of those well-thumbed Penguin Classics pages.

There was one other interesting point of complementarity. I have a boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia that I got for Christmas when I was ten. Somewhere along the line I lost one book—The Last Battle. Bizarrely, Holly, owns one volume of the Chronicles of Narnia—The Last Battle. It’s a slightly later edition, but it fits neatly into the slipcase with the others. A complete set at last.