BOOKISH EXHIBITIONISM
posted by James Reel
When I'm too busy or too lazy to do any original blogging, it's time to dig around in the archive of a literary e-zine for which I used to write and recycle some essay that's not too dated. Here's one for you:
Show Me The Books!
Admit it. When you visit someone for the first time, you contrive, as soon as possible, to examine your host's library. However genuine your interest may be, book-browsing seems so intellectual; it's much more impressive than coming up with some vacuous comment about the decor. But it also reduces you to the status of a peeping tom. You're really just sneaking a peek at someone else's soul.
I do it all the time. It's gratifying to find that my friends are interested in some of the same novels I am. It's intriguing to discover what other specific books and general subjects fascinate them -- perhaps they'll fascinate me, too, or else they'll be sure signs that I've fallen in with a drudge or a lunatic. And it's frightening to realize that every house in America holds those same black-and-blue-bound 1970s book club editions of Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
It's also amusing to detect, through someone's library, some quirk of character that would otherwise remain hidden. So, this upstanding attorney turns out to be an A.A. Milne freak. So, this guy who's always talking about Charles Simic hasn't read any of Simic's collections since Dismantling the Silence. So, this other guy who's always posing as a right-wing, gun-hoarding redneck collects biographies of classical musicians. So, this woman who's stuck on Milan Kundera hasn't bothered to look into anything earlier than The Unbearable Lightness of Being. So, this fellow who once mentioned that A Confederacy of Dunces is his favorite novel was understating the case -- he owns a copy of every single edition.
Of course, our selection of front-room books reveals our conceits, too. In many households, the encyclopedia and the big coffee-table books are for display only, unread volumes designed to give a room a more intellectual air . These are merely peacock pages; the real items of interest in such homes are on the bedside table, or in a rack next to the toilet.
Few things frustrate me more than going to a house and not being able to find the books. One friend I know to be an avid reader doesn't keep a single book on the ground floor of his home. Only after I'd visited a few times did he consent to lead me upstairs into a room containing a modest shelving unit, which could not possibly constitute his entire library. He majored in English, for god's sake. He quotes the Romantic poets from memory . Where the hell are all the books? What is he trying to hide?
It's an affront, friends concealing their books from me. How am I supposed to understand these people if I can't peruse their libraries? Don't they trust me? Aren't we as close as I thought? What else are they not telling me?
Wait -- I can't take it so personally. Surely everyone keeps at least a few books private.
My wife and I, for example, used to divide our books into two groups. The nice hardcover editions we kept out in public areas; the crappy-looking paperbacks we hid away. I gradually replaced the mass-market paperbacks with more presentable versions, so now the distribution follows better logic. Shelved in the room where we first receive guests are the history and American lit, simply because they happen to fill those bookcases without having to spill into other areas. Books on art, music, anthropology and a few other subjects, as well as oversized tomes, go into the living room, where most guests eventually gather. Everything else -- mainly non-American lit and volumes on science, travel, gardening, hiking, whatever -- gets stored in the shelf-lined room we grandly refer to as the Library (which also holds all the CDs and LPs).
A tour of three rooms would give any visitor a nearly complete view of our bookish interests.
Except for those items we squirrel away elsewhere. Some are merely tattered professional journals, like the thrilling Rhetoric Society Quarterly, that really don't need to be underfoot; some are textbooks my wife uses, or used to use, in her teaching. But then there's the French-language edition of the Madonna Sex book, which my wife's daughter gave us as a joke a few years ago. We slide it onto a lower shelf in our bedroom not because of the content, which is hardly even risqué by soft porn standards, but because of the book's format: The oversized, spiral-bound metal covers just don't fit in any sort of upright position, unlike Madonna herself.
Which now reminds me of the demurely illustrated sex manual I received for review purposes from a publicist, brought home and hid under the bed, where it will be convenient if consultation ever becomes necessary (luckily, it is carefully indexed). At least I tell myself I keep it under the bed for ready access. The truth is that I put it there so it won't fall under the gaze of our housecleaners, even though they don't vacuum under the furniture and, even if they did, they certainly would not be shocked to encounter a sex manual anywhere in the house.
It's a question not of shame, but of shielding some small part of life, however innocuous, from public scrutiny. A bookshelf is more revealing than a delicate negligee, for the garment teases at laying bare nothing more than flesh. The bookshelf lays bare our minds -- our preoccupations, our aspirations, our guilty pleasures. For the sake of privacy, and sanity, everyone should stash at least one book under the bed.
