BackNot knowing where to bookend
You know you own too many books when you are buying new copies of ones you have but can't find
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The organization where I work has “hot seating". This means nobody has a fixed place to sit. One comes into the office and plonks oneself down where space is available. This means, or should mean (I think that being the point), that one sits around a work table with different people every day, often not from the same part of the organization as you.
There are a few “conference rooms" (a rather grand word for small spaces with a table and four or so chairs). These must be booked in advance for meetings, and such bookings are not always easy to get.
If no room is available, then meetings must be held on the street or in some coffee shop.
It goes without saying, of course, that in such a place there is no question of cabins, even for the grandees, who must follow the hot-seating rule.
Now, the organization is moving to a new office that is slightly larger (the market we are in is growing, unfortunately). But even in the new office we will continue to have, more or less, the same rules that have stood us in good stead.
It is with shame, then, that I must report that I sent this email out to the human resources manager this week.
“Subject: New office requirement.
Naveena, I need a small space for myself in the new office. Doesn’t have to be fancy, but will need storage and will need to be secure. Please see if something can be assigned."
If it be thought that this is for me to act like a boxwallah again after all these years, that would be untrue. I have no need for cabins and will continue to sit with colleagues where space may be found.
But I am clean out of room for storing books at home and I cannot seem to stop buying more. There is just no more space, and yet the packages continue to come. It is akin to addiction, and I do not want to belittle or demean the 12-step programme when I write here that I actually looked at it to see which of the steps applied.
I can think of at least two:
“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable." This bit is true in two, unconnected, ways. And: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves."
This inventory-taking sounds like the sort of thing I ought to do immediately, but where is one to start? There is absolutely no chance that, once emptied, the shelves can be restocked without scores of books spilling. It is against the laws of science.
My entire study is double-shelved, meaning one doesn’t know what lies in the row behind.
The 500 or so (God alone knows) Penguin Black Classics are bricked so tightly that they are impossible to remove and will no doubt remain there till the house is excavated in some future era (“they read Montaigne and Vitruvius!").
I have begun buying second copies of works I know I already have on the assumption that the first copy will not be found—the latest being Simon Schama’s The Story Of The Jews: Finding The Words, 1000 BC-1492 AD and R.M. Kasliwal’s The Impact Of Netaji And INA On India’s Independence.
Worryingly, I notice I am unable to resist even those books that I know I will never read (what could I have possibly been thinking when ordering Bloody Bayonets: The Complete Guide To Bayonet Fighting?). Then there are books that seemed important at the time, but now, when they begin to arrive and wait to be stacked, it is not easy to justify their purchase (Iron Kingdom: The Rise And Downfall Of Prussia, 1600-1947).
My desk, whose top is full of gorgeous busts of philosophers and tyrants and artists, collected from Athens and Florence and Kolkata (and Amazon) resembles nothing so much as a bunker in Kashmir. Instead of sandbags, there are great heaps of books on it and the busts and figurines are entirely hidden.
What is one to do with the many volumes of The Collected Works Of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah? Horribly expensive and totally useless (there are copies of his motor car bills and lots of banal correspondence).
I have a beautiful revolving bookcase, a wide and full-sized thing that has become unusable. It has dozens of tomes stacked on top of it making it so heavy that it doesn’t really revolve.
And the four glass doors, each locked, will never ever be opened for fear that they will kill under an avalanche whoever does so. The large, lilac, bound volumes of Mahatma Gandhi’s Harijan reside there—thrilling to read? Boring? Who knows? Never to be visited.
So, I am sorry, but action must be taken to address this, and that action is, clearly, to build an extension of the study—an annexe—in the office. Yes, that is the solution.
I may be accused of misusing my position, but that is something I am going to have to live with. If I get a space with two free walls and one wall with a window, that should be enough to hold at least 500 books.
It should see me through the end of the year.
Aakar Patel is executive director of Amnesty International India. The views expressed here are personal. He tweets at aakar_amnesty.
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