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Ivory Tower
Artemio Cruz is just a character in a book. Gen. Obregon was real!
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"Motherless Brooklyn"
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By Matt T. Stover
[09/22/99]

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"Of course we need it," I reply.

"But we already have the 'Collected Poems' in hardback and paperback. Not to mention the New American Library edition."

"But this one's so … portable," I say, searching for a reason to keep this completely superfluous book. It's New York in July, 98 degrees, 100 percent humidity, and OK, I'm a little irrational. We have to move a ton of books to Los Angeles. Not a figurative ton, but an actual one: 1,934 pounds. Our movers have just given us an obscene cost estimate that we can neither believe nor afford. I'm starting to wish I had grown up cultivating a less bulky obsession -- the flute, maybe.

We're standing in a maze of towering and precariously arranged piles of books, removed from the built-in shelves that line all four walls of all three rooms of our Brooklyn Heights apartment. How did we end up with this gross overload? I flash back to our blind date two and a half years ago. Joan, the cupid who set it up, kindled our interest with book talk. "She loves to read," she told Matthew. "He may be the best-read person I've ever met," she told me. Eight months later we merged book collections and lives into a miraculously affordable apartment that could house us and our books. A small fourth-floor walk-up? Circa 1920? No problem. We continued to ply each other with favorite novels, thick poetry collections and glamorous never-to-be-opened gifts such as "The Architecture Pack."

Turning to the shelves, I steel myself. I come from a long line of pack rats -- "throwing away" and "sorting through" are not phrases in the Amon vocabulary. This isn't a matter of choice, I think, and I will have to be ruthless. Whole sections are going to have to go. For instance, the audiobooks: both of them. The tape of Dickens' "Martin Chuzzleworth" I bought Matthew for our first Christmas together is still shrink-wrapped (six-hour abridgement by Paul Scofield -- what was I thinking?). The other, Elizabeth Smart's "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept," is another easy call. We both loved the book's poetry and passion, and we gave the tape a go on a long drive through Napa last spring. We made it through about three minutes of the singsong lament before exploding in laughter and chucking the tape out the window. We stopped to pick it up (after backing up over it) only because we thought it would make a good joke present. Ha.

Emboldened, I turn to nonfiction. Am I really planning to read that 800-page biography of Lytton Strachey, or do I just enjoy being the kind of person who might? The problem is, I am the kind of person who might. I postpone this decision and move on to unemotional reference books. Four different dictionaries, three thesauruses, "Benet's Readers Encyclopedia": all keepers. You never know.

But what about this two-volume almanac of Polish history, weighing in at three and a half pounds? I bought it seven years ago when I was toying with the idea of writing a novel partially set in Krakow, but it's since become clear I will not be writing this particular novel anytime soon. Nor am I likely to develop a more casual interest in things Polish. It can go. I get ready to chuck it, only to be struck by its pristine, slipcovered beauty. "Definitive," raves one reviewer. Thumbing its thick, cream-colored pages, I can only suppose that it is. And am I really willing to forfeit my claims on the as-yet-unwritten Great Polish-American Novel?

Stealthily, I set it back in the pile of keepers and shift my sights to another teetering stack, topped by Matthew's old copy of "Iron John." This I surreptitiously slip in with the other rejects. Good work.

Next page | Hitchcockian dementia strikes the collector