For years I've managed to get by on a lone bookshelf, one of those single-wide Ikea jobs everyone somehow seems to acquire six months on either side of college graduation. It has proven more durable than much of my other furniture from that Big Blue Box - the key, I've discovered, is to never take anything apart - and has been tall enough to absorb the trickle of new material I occasionally toss up on its shelves.
It's only been in the past couple of years, really, that the shelf has begun to fail me. Its inadequacy emerged innocently enough, when in a rush I placed a couple of volumes horizontally across an upright row of like-sized books. I suppose I could have rearranged a few titles and found some unforeseen space, but I viewed this solution as simultaneously expedient and ingenious; not only had it made use of available real estate, but did so without obscuring the names of nearby books, most of which, honestly, I had never read, nor really planned to read. Like Johnny Carson for all those years on the Tonight Show, it was more important for me to know they were there than to actually flip through their pages. For me they were decorations, symbolic of my interests, but little else.
My disinterest in reading, however, hardly prevented me from acquiring new books. I just knew there'd be some speed-reading frenzy on the horizon and I was desperate to be ready. Before long I ran out of horizontal storage on top of the existing rows of upright tomes, forcing me to apply the technique in front of those rows, starting from the surface of each shelf. At this point the strategy became a victim of its own success, with books jutting outward from the shelf face and scaling upward over the spines of everything else. If a visitor had seen this sight in a vacuum, they would think I was quite prolific reader indeed.
Alas, that same visitor, if he bothered to look around, wouldn't find another book in my entire apartment. I'm into periodicals...
No comments:
Post a Comment