Russell Smith: On Cultures
A lament for the bookshelf

In the future, our books will be invisible, like our music, but we’ll be the poorer for it. Here’s why
Published Globe & Mail,  on Thursday, Mar. 04, 2010

In the age of the e-book, what will happen to bookshelves? How will we decorate our apartments? How will we judge our prospective partners?

I am living in the aftermath of a move, where as usual the books have been the most obstructive and expensive and dustiest element. They have been moved from student room to disastrous relationship to shared house to storage locker for 20 years now, and they have not suffered, indeed they have proliferated as they migrated, like a great nomadic herd. Many of them have traversed this vast country more than once; some have crossed an ocean. My books thrive on upheaval: It causes them to spawn.

Before every move, I perform a heartbreaking yet necessary cull. I isolate the weakest – the review copies of self-help books, the self-published novels sent to me with challenging notes, the anthologies compiled for noble charities – and I drive them to a local library or Goodwill with a guilty feeling. (Fiction is more likely to survive this cull than non-fiction, because it is less topical: All the books I bought in the nineties on “computer culture” are uninteresting except to a specialist in failed prognostications. But a novel from the nineties with a computer in it is fascinating.)

And still on every move there are 10 more boxes than there were before, and new Ikea shelves to be assembled and found space for. When I am grown up, I will have a carpenter build me bookcases of actual wood, but by then there will be no more books.

I paid movers this time, and they were dismayed but half amazed too. “Have you read all these?” asked one, and I said yes, although the truth is complicated. (I try not to store a single book that I haven’t read or am not planning to read, and yet there are some signed by friends or colleagues that are just not my kind of thing and that I can’t throw away or the universe will punish me for my ingratitude.) And I’m not even the obsessive bibliophile type: I have very few first editions, most are paperbacks, and there are very few I would not use as a coaster or doorstop. I know guys who keep their books behind smoked glass and won’t let you rest your spectacles on top of one.

So I always wonder, on every move, why I add to the cost and cut down the space in my inevitably tiny new living quarters by keeping these. People come to see my minuscule new living room and say, hmm, you could have another foot and a half without that wall of bookshelves. True, but then you would never be able to distract yourself, while waiting for me to dress, by pulling down, at random, Weapons of World War II and 100 Erotic Drawings.


Read Russell Smith's full piece at The Globe & Mail.