encased

(what a waste. A picture from Dr Zhivago and no Omar Sharif)

Your intrepid correspondent has just clawed her way out of a different hell from last week's: room after room where there is nowhere to put your foot, hoovers and piles of crap and even worse piles of books taking up the whole place, and nowhere at all empty or spacious but a zillion gaping, dusty, mocking bookshelves... The good news is that it almost works. The bad news is that I have nearly two feet of fiction left over.

AGHHHH!!!

And my arms ache. Actually, I ache all over; it's hard work, carrying books by the yard around the place. But in fact it's all good, really: two feet of fiction left over is a sight better than what I had before. It may be soluble if another place to put the poetry magazines presents itself, which I fully expect it to do in due course. Maybe the bin. But in any case, I now have the poetry collections all together in order, the lit crit all together in order, letters and journals in order next to the lit crit; biog, autobiog & memoir in sort-of order (shelf-height constraints), misc all together in sort-of order, and poetry anthologies and other-misc over by the desk.

I have a desk! It's my old white table and to me it is beautiful.

I didn't put up all the shelves, of course: Ray did. All I had to do was come to Crouch End and pay for everything, trying the while to look like a woman of the world who would never be frightened of a little thing like a lumberyard bill; help carry; spend the day making a nice lunch and endless post of coffee, and listen cheerfully while Ray criticised my biscuit selection. (Too many e-numbers, apparently. Isn't that what biscuits are for? I thought everybody liked pink wafers. This is what you get with these intellectual friend-of-friend shelf-builders.)

Well, and one's natural sense of order is still offended: WG Sebald, the polymath, doesn't even have two books in one section: no, he has one book in each of four sections: fiction (Austerlitz: read it now), memoir (for want of something better), lit crit, and poetry. Ditto Guy Davenport (lit crit, fiction, letters), and several others. Ditto Delmore Schwartz. How did I come to own three books by him?

Several people have said to me this week, in anticipation of these shelves: "I suppose you're the kind of person who has their* books in [scathing shudder] order..." Ray was the last. Why? Why wouldn't you?? God, the wasted hours looking for something nowhere to be found, and I uncovered a couple or duplicates - including, shockingly, a hardback copy of Don Paterson's "aphorisms" which was double-stacked behind something, and of which I only bought a paperback copy (secondhand) a few weeks ago. Argh! Anyway, not that I need to justify my ways to you, readers, I also find it useful when writing, or even blogging, to be able to look things up easily.

To say nothing of all the old stuff I'm no longer even remotely interested in, which has been safely stashed behind aeverything else all these years - now open to the full glare of day, the present, and anyone who comes into my living room. Apparently I used to be quite interested in Lincoln Steffens.

The ex-Mr B's father, an avid and very erudite book-collector, lived his days among towering stacks of books. Their whole house was fitted with beautiful bookshelves, all of which were double-stacked with amazing things like Victorian calf-bound sets of the Brontes, 17th century law books, and the like. He had an account at Blackwells, & I think they pretty much automatically sent him anything new and important that came out.* Poor ex-Mr B himself grew up among the stacks: while he was still a child the overflow encroached into his very room. I've seen the pictures. When ex-Mr B's father died, they went through the stacks and among many other things they found nine copies of Dr Zhivago. You know: every time he wanted to look for it, it would be inaccessible at the bottom of a pile behind another pile, or something, so he'd simply buy another.

And do you know? I've ended up without one. But I do have two separate editions of Pasternak's poems, one of which is a satisfyingly cheesy movie-tie-in hardback with technicolor snow-covered dachas all over the covers.

Thanks for reading this. I really felt I had nothing much to say, but I wanted to respond to commenter Anne's heartfelt plea to get Boris off the top of my page. What a picture to go quiet on.

And now to work. Bloody coffee shops, you go there to write, away from your horrible house, and they they offer you access to some wifi network!


* Typo fixed; thanks, Des.

** Don't get all excited. I managed to come out if it with something like the old man's Complete Shakepeare, Alain-Fournier's Les Grand Meaulnes, in French, and a paperback short stories of Saki covered with green paper.