Open for Business
Last night we started and finished putting books into the bookshelves. We’d spent 16 hours on Sunday with the carpenter installing bookshelves across 5.6 metres of wall, the length of the main interior living room wall. About two metres of that space is “entertainment unit,” i.e., shelving for the television, DVD, and CDs, and probably about 50 centimetres is structural, so that puts the bookshelves themselves at about 3 metres all up horizontally. They stand over three meters tall, so with the bottom space reserved for LPs, there are 6 shelves in each section, making 18 metres of books. As we approached the end of the fiction, we had already filled over three quarters of the shelves and were seriously concerned we’d run out of room. I guess it says a lot that we still have 3 entirely blank shelves – a metre or so – even after loading in the non-fiction and a separate section for poetry and drama (but I’ll let someone else do that math). My fault, I guess, since my life before marriage had been devoted largely to the accumulation of books, and my previous access to the Strand me with an inexpensive option in obtaining hardcover editions. We’ve integrated Meera’s not insubstantial collection, which is where 90% of the poetry and about half the non-fiction comes from. Tomorrow we’ll do the LPs, and I expect them to fill the remaining space. The empty-apartment echo has been reduced significantly, but I don’t know we’ll ever eliminate it entirely without carpets, and neither of us is inclined to unnecessary rugs.