Josh Getzler
Last week, while cleaning up our apartment for a party, my wife and I did a little bit of thematic organization of our bookshelves. We have five floor-to-ceiling built-in units, which were the cornerstones of the renovations we did on the apartment when we moved into it nine years ago. (We also have units in each of our kid rooms.)
Clearly, for us the having of books, and the displaying of them, is a vital element of our aesthetic sense. When my wife and I started dating--16 years ago today, in fact--I was living in a studio apartment, just graduated from business school and trying to figure out whether to go into minor league baseball or back into publishing, whence I came before the MBA.
The most striking thing about that apartment, which I loved until Donald Trump took away my view of the Hudson River, was not the fact that I could get 80 people into it every third Saturday night for parties. Rather it was the wall of books I had, which I'd lugged first from my room at my folks', then from my college dorms/apartments/houses, then to West End Avenue.
I'd increased the number of books in my library by at least a third during my three years at Harcourt. I also had developed a new way of organizing my books. Because I had spent some time learning how the sausage is made, as it were, I'd become fascinated by the trim size of books; whether they were 6x9, 5x8, Trade paperback or mass market pb. I'd learned that a thriller was larger and boxier, a literary novel smaller and sleeker--and closer in look and feel to a trade paperback.
So I began to organize my books by publisher and by trim size. It was, in a word, ridiculous. At least to everyone but me. Histories were next to mysteries, novels next to philosophy texts, Ball Four next to Absalom, Absalom, because their books were the same size. Then I started dating Amanda, and then married her. And we needed to merge our stuff. And we almost got divorced when I started to put her books into piles by size, and she stopped me. And not gently. I believe she might have called me a lunatic. Certainly she rolled her eyes. And then pointed out that while she would indulge me by letting me organize them at ALL, it would make a lot more sense to be thematic, rather than, well, random but, you know, neat.
So as we put our books away before the party--now we double row, five years back in publishing and all these years together having made even our abundant shelves bulge--we saw our sections. The business school and MEd books are now in a corner; the British history books dominate, the mysteries are in their place, the Judaica and Penguin Classics near the dining room table. There are still a couple of shelves nearly in trim size order, but that kind of project no longer makes sense.
This isn't a blog post about the fact that I am simply grateful to have all these books; that they are beautiful and smell good, like must and coffee and red wine and suntan lotion, depending on where I read them; and that isn't it a pity that future generations will have less and less of it as ebooks predominate. While romantic, if you know me and my collection of gadgetry you know that that's not where my sentimentality lies, entirely.
Rather, this is about the feelings I had when cleaning up about these books as representatives of stages of my life, and that now, at 43, I was having a new party, cramming too many people into my apartment. There are now guides to child-rearing and World History textbooks alongside my shelf of books I edited or represented. As in my bachelor pad with the well-organized shelves 16 years ago, when I went out with an old friend to see Restoration and soon found myself in love, engaged and married, I am happy in my life.
