Since the start of the new year, I’ve given away dozens of books from my library, for free, to people I know. First I put all the books I planned on keeping into three boxes, then I filled my bookcase at work with as many of the rest as I could fit and sent a memo advertising “FREE BOOKS: Take what you can carry!” Any time I met people for drinks this week, I brought along a book or two for each person — including the time I was invited to drinks with people I had never met before, one of whom asked whether, since I was giving away my possessions, they could assume I was planning a terrorist attack. No, just a New Year’s resolution to get out from under my book-avarice. I was starting to stare at my bookcase for twenty minutes at a time, not to pick out a book, but simply to bask in its musty alphabetical splendor. I’m not saying that admiring your own bookshelf is a bad thing to do; I just know it’s a spiritual hazard in my case.
To give you an idea of the magnitude of my divestment, my library used to fill ten crammed shelves in two bookcases, two bedside-table piles, four hip-high floor piles, and all the free space on my desks at home and at the office. I’ve got it down to five shelves and two floor-piles, not counting my bookshelf at work, which contains books that haven’t found new homes yet. I’m still holding on to the stacks I use to prop up the slats under my bed to keep it from sagging, but as soon as I order the replacement part from Ikea I’ll give those away too.
Filosofa’s Republic , the fabulously rare novel by Anthony Daniels, a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple? Gone. Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers , the best book ever written about the Chicago Democratic machine? Gone. Pegler: Angry Man of the Press ? Road to Oxiana ? My Joseph de Maistre, my John Lukacs, my lovingly annotated Power Broker with its “shut up Caro you just don’t get NYC politics” marginalia? Gone, gone, gone, gone. No one has claimed my Daniel Patrick Moynihan collection yet, but it’s not long for this world, and if no one grabs Pospielovsky’s The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime , then my friends have worse taste than I thought.
I never expected to decimate my collection like this. In fact, if you had asked my friends to make a list of things they thought me wildly unlikely ever to do, somewhere behind “climb Mount Everest” and “chuck it all in and open a knitting shop in Utica” — and not very far behind them, either — would be giving away books for free. I’m an anti-social magazine editor whose childhood dream was to be Librarian of Congress, for one thing. For another, I am not exactly famous for my generosity, or even my generosity of spirit — I swear, for years I thought that “to forget someone’s birthday” was just an idiomatic expression, because remembering birthdays wasn’t something anyone did in real life. It’s entirely possible that I have a reputation for being solipsistic — that’s something external to me, so I haven’t noticed.
Was it as hard as I thought it would be to part from nearly 50 percent of my collection? Actually, it was harder. For instance, I had not expected to wince, physically wince , when someone took away all my Patrick Leigh Fermor. I had not expected to come home after my book give-away and start pouring myself a drink and singing “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.” I also hadn’t bargained on the paranoia: Giving away books, especially to coworkers, has made me extremely worried about what I might have written in them. I don’t think I fill the endpages of my books with doodles of torture implements, plot outlines for my first novel, or columns of me practicing what my signature would look like if I were married to Martin Amis, but who knows, I do funny things when I’m drunk.
But spiritual improvement is supposed to hurt, and there’s no doubt that I feel spiritually improved by having diminished my attachment to material possessions. And while I know that books are denigrated as gifts — because they’re pretentious and because they seem to impose an obligation on the recipient — I can’t help feeling that I’ve brightened a few days in my capacity as the Book Fairy of New York City, and that’s a nicer feeling than I ever got from gazing at my shelves.
So, readers who happen to be in the New York City area: If you wish to acquire a copy of Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World , A Visit to Don Otavio , The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge , The Rise of the Meritocracy , Raymond Chandler Speaking , Thy Hand Great Anarch , Seeing Like a State , Ashenden , Hugh Kingsmill: A Biography , The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia , or Monrovia Mon Amour , just drop me a line. You’ll be doing me a favor.
