I Murdered My Library (Kindle Single) by Linda Grant

I am moving
house. I am moving from the spacious flat I have lived in for 19 years, a
corner house very bright and full of windows, a place of flights of stairs and
landings and hallways, no room on the same level as another. A quirky flat that
no-one but me wanted to buy in 1994, but an awful lot of it, from the yellow
rose bush round the front door to the attic and eaves. There has always been
space for more books; you could tuck in a few shelves in all kinds of places. I
had them built when I moved here, by a carpenter called Crispin. It was his
last job in London before he moved to Somerset and faded from my sight. ‘These
aren’t going anywhere,’ he said, as he applied brackets to the wall that have
made the bookcases difficult to remove. Over the years I have had to paint
round them.
    But
however many shelves Crispin built there were still never enough. The books in
alphabetical rows were overgrown by piles of new books, doubled in front. Books
multiplied, books swarmed, books, I sometimes dreamt, seemed to reproduce
themselves – they were a papery population explosion. When they had exhausted
the shelves, they started to take over the stairs; I had to vacuum round them.
You cannot have a taste for minimalist décor if you seriously read books.
    Many
books are in my office; they are in a stand-off with technology as to which can
take up more space, and aggravate and inconvenience me more. Who hasn’t crawled
under the desk to disconnect a plug to attach some new gadget, and fused the
reading lamp?
     The
books line three sides of the room. A niche was left facing the window to accommodate
an armchair for the purposes of daydreaming, drinking tea and wishing I still
smoked cigarettes. Most of these office books are fiction, arranged
alphabetically by author, with a separate shelf for the Greek and Latin
classics: for Homer, Ovid, Aristophanes and Herodotus. Outside, up a flight of
stairs, the second landing houses mainly hardback biography (Dickens, George
Eliot, Eleanor Roosevelt, Coco Chanel). The third landing is the repository for
other non-fiction – top shelf the Holocaust, next shelf travel writing, bottom
shelf fashion monographs. The Vietnam war has its own section. In the bedroom,
a freestanding bookcase shelves current reading or to-be-reads. Lost books hide
under the bed, cohabiting with drifting dust balls, straying pens and old,
snotty tissues from colds and flu.
    As
well as the treasures, there are books I did not particularly care for, but
kept anyway, or the books I bought but never read, or the books I started but
did not finish, and put away in case I wanted to come back to them. The review
copies, the books sent by hopeful publishers entreating a jacket quote, and the
non-fiction which I kept in the era before the internet, in case I ever needed
to look up biographical details about, say, Oscar Levant, or Augustus John, or
Vera Brittain. There are books that are evidence of past passions in which I no
longer feel much interest (travel writing comes into this category), and the
monumental-in-size coffee-table volumes on fashion. But I nonetheless have
shelved them all.
    And I
have kept, because I didn’t know what else to do with them, dozens of copies of
my own books. Publishers generously – or maybe maliciously – send authors boxes
of each imprint: first the proof, then the hardback, then the paperback, and subsequently
each reprint of the paperback, each re-jacketing. The deal is part of the
contract. We are supposed to give them away to our friends and family, but I
suffer from English embarrassment. I can’t press my books into the hands of
others (still less follow up with, ‘So, what did you make of it?’). Boxes of
books (proof, hardback, paperback) cross the Atlantic from Scribner and Dutton
and Grove. Foreign language editions arrive from Italy, France, Germany, China
and Brazil. The husband of a famous novelist told me they kept hers under the
bed. Another writer said he