Mari
New Member
The original is here, from the New York Times (free registration required).
It says something about the nesting habits of certain bookish New Yorkers that when a shopper took a wrong turn out of the Strand one day, he wandered into Hank O'Neal's apartment and mistook it for an annex of the bookstore.
He was looking for the rare book room, but he took the wrong door, which led to the wrong elevator, which opened directly onto Mr. O'Neal's front hall. There the man was, methodically making his way along a hallway bookshelf sagging under the complete works of Djuna Barnes when Mr. O'Neal's wife, Shelley Shier, looked up.
''Excuse me, can I help you?'' she called.
''Oh, no,'' the man answered cheerily. ''Just browsing.''
New York City is full of people like Mr. O'Neal -- lifelong bibliophiles with a proclivity for accumulation, holed up in compact spaces in the intimate company of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books.
The phenomenon is not unique to New York, but it is abetted by a few facts of life here: Books are ubiquitous and often affordable; space is tight, and rent laws, just renewed, encourage people to stay put.
It does not take long to fill up a rent-stabilized, one-bedroom apartment, if a person is buying, say, a book a day -- off remainder tables, in flea markets, in used bookstores, from catalogues, off sidewalk tables, from one of those megabookstores gobbling up the city.
Suddenly, there are books under the litter box, books under the bed, books rising in towers. Moving might force a collector to winnow. But the rent is manageable, and real estate is expensive. So, why move?
Books are, furthermore, essential to many a New Yorker's self-image. The appeal is sartorial as well as cerebral. In certain circles, there seems to be an assumption that intellectual tonnage correlates with linear footage of books.
Just as empty nesters in Los Angeles convert their children's bedrooms into closets, New Yorkers commandeer bedrooms for books, even before their children move out.
So what if no one can read all 10,000? ''The point is, you're always going to read,'' said Peter F. Skinner, who has about 6,000 books in his tiny Greenwich Village tenement, the sort of place that might be inhabited by a literate hedgehog in a British children's book.
''As Anthony Burgess said, there's no better reason for not reading a book than owning it,'' said Mr. Skinner, who recently moved 2,250 more books to a $90-a-month storage locker he had furnished with bookcases on casters. ''It's always there to read.''
There is an airline claims manager with 4,500 cookbooks in her Murray Hill apartment, an architect with 10,000 architecture books, an obstetrician-gynecologist whose Brooklyn apartment is overrun with books about Napoleon.
There is Edward Robb Ellis, an 87-year-old writer, who shares his four-room apartment in Chelsea with what he estimates to be 10,000 books, including, he reveals proudly, five sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Ron Kolm, a writer and bookstore night manager, lost his bedroom in Long Island City, Queens, to his archive of downtown writing. For years, he and his wife have slept in the living room on a fold-out bed.
He recalled watching his reading material rise to a height of seven feet. ''I felt like Schliemann, only in reverse,'' Mr. Kolm said, referring to the 19th-century German archeologist. ''Instead of excavating the levels of Troy, I was creating them.''
Then there are the serious cases.
Landlords have been known to fire off letters warning tenants to divest themselves of books or face eviction. Mr. Kolm swears he knew a man who took to spending nights on the fire escape, peering in at his books.
''I've been in places where there were books in the bathtub,'' said Henry Holman, who rummages through apartments as the buyer for Gryphon Bookshop on the Upper West Side. ''I've been in apartments where there were books in the bed. I've been in apartments where you were hard put to imagine exactly where they did sleep.''
Those cases are ''getting into the realm of, at least by my definition, a kind of pathology,'' continued Mr. Holman, who lives with thousands of books, and his wife, in a one-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights. ''You might imagine some kind of underground animal bringing in things and making a nest.'' Some people keep their books sprawled in heaps. Others pack their books meticulously in built-in shelves -- horizontal, vertical, and in double rows in what one called a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
Books are insulation -- psychic, emotional, physical. For those who believe books are superior to humans, they are also hard to unload. They are a link to the past, an escape from the present, a reminder of how much remains to be known. They make statements, intended or not.
''I can't see you to the door, really,'' explained Ann Douglas, a Columbia professor with 8,000 books in her one-bedroom apartment, maneuvering past a bookcase half-obstructing the front door. ''You know, in some sense, it could seem they were more important than you. And you know, in some sense, they are.''
The 1920's are in the hall, William James is in the kitchen (because he said philosophy was meant to be not a printed bill of fare but a hearty meal). ''In the bedroom initially it was all theology,'' Professor Douglas said. ''I thought, 'Sleep with God. That's the best plan.' ''
When Columbia paid to move her from Princeton, she says, the moving company classified her household as a small library and billed extra. ''I kept protesting: 'Look, I have a bed! There's a stove here!' '' she said recently. ''They said, 'Lots of libraries have beds.' ''
The problem starts innocently enough, as it did for Dalia Carmel. She arrived from Israel in 1960, not knowing, she says, how to boil water. A brochure from the Cookbook Club, addressed to Resident, landed in her mailbox, offering three books for a dollar if she signed up.
She picked the three biggest, figuring they would tell her the most. But others kept coming, as book-club books do. Then she discovered remainder tables.
Now her 4,500 cookbooks cram shelves in every room of the two-bedroom apartment she and her husband have occupied since 1978. Some nestle snugly against the ceiling.
There are entire sections devoted to subjects like ''pancakes'' and ''nuts.'' There are sections for Balkan, Turkish, Hawaiian cuisine. There are diplomatic cookbooks and expatriate cookbooks and books bought for a single recipe -- say, horseradish mousse.
Not long ago, Ms. Carmel (who now cooks rather well) noticed that her bread books were listing. To avert an avalanche, she reached up and gave them a shove. She tore her right rotator cuff, ended up in surgery and now finds herself in bookstores reading books she already has at home rather than risk re-injury by digging them out.
Continued below.
It says something about the nesting habits of certain bookish New Yorkers that when a shopper took a wrong turn out of the Strand one day, he wandered into Hank O'Neal's apartment and mistook it for an annex of the bookstore.
He was looking for the rare book room, but he took the wrong door, which led to the wrong elevator, which opened directly onto Mr. O'Neal's front hall. There the man was, methodically making his way along a hallway bookshelf sagging under the complete works of Djuna Barnes when Mr. O'Neal's wife, Shelley Shier, looked up.
''Excuse me, can I help you?'' she called.
''Oh, no,'' the man answered cheerily. ''Just browsing.''
New York City is full of people like Mr. O'Neal -- lifelong bibliophiles with a proclivity for accumulation, holed up in compact spaces in the intimate company of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books.
The phenomenon is not unique to New York, but it is abetted by a few facts of life here: Books are ubiquitous and often affordable; space is tight, and rent laws, just renewed, encourage people to stay put.
It does not take long to fill up a rent-stabilized, one-bedroom apartment, if a person is buying, say, a book a day -- off remainder tables, in flea markets, in used bookstores, from catalogues, off sidewalk tables, from one of those megabookstores gobbling up the city.
Suddenly, there are books under the litter box, books under the bed, books rising in towers. Moving might force a collector to winnow. But the rent is manageable, and real estate is expensive. So, why move?
Books are, furthermore, essential to many a New Yorker's self-image. The appeal is sartorial as well as cerebral. In certain circles, there seems to be an assumption that intellectual tonnage correlates with linear footage of books.
Just as empty nesters in Los Angeles convert their children's bedrooms into closets, New Yorkers commandeer bedrooms for books, even before their children move out.
So what if no one can read all 10,000? ''The point is, you're always going to read,'' said Peter F. Skinner, who has about 6,000 books in his tiny Greenwich Village tenement, the sort of place that might be inhabited by a literate hedgehog in a British children's book.
''As Anthony Burgess said, there's no better reason for not reading a book than owning it,'' said Mr. Skinner, who recently moved 2,250 more books to a $90-a-month storage locker he had furnished with bookcases on casters. ''It's always there to read.''
There is an airline claims manager with 4,500 cookbooks in her Murray Hill apartment, an architect with 10,000 architecture books, an obstetrician-gynecologist whose Brooklyn apartment is overrun with books about Napoleon.
There is Edward Robb Ellis, an 87-year-old writer, who shares his four-room apartment in Chelsea with what he estimates to be 10,000 books, including, he reveals proudly, five sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Ron Kolm, a writer and bookstore night manager, lost his bedroom in Long Island City, Queens, to his archive of downtown writing. For years, he and his wife have slept in the living room on a fold-out bed.
He recalled watching his reading material rise to a height of seven feet. ''I felt like Schliemann, only in reverse,'' Mr. Kolm said, referring to the 19th-century German archeologist. ''Instead of excavating the levels of Troy, I was creating them.''
Then there are the serious cases.
Landlords have been known to fire off letters warning tenants to divest themselves of books or face eviction. Mr. Kolm swears he knew a man who took to spending nights on the fire escape, peering in at his books.
''I've been in places where there were books in the bathtub,'' said Henry Holman, who rummages through apartments as the buyer for Gryphon Bookshop on the Upper West Side. ''I've been in apartments where there were books in the bed. I've been in apartments where you were hard put to imagine exactly where they did sleep.''
Those cases are ''getting into the realm of, at least by my definition, a kind of pathology,'' continued Mr. Holman, who lives with thousands of books, and his wife, in a one-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights. ''You might imagine some kind of underground animal bringing in things and making a nest.'' Some people keep their books sprawled in heaps. Others pack their books meticulously in built-in shelves -- horizontal, vertical, and in double rows in what one called a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
Books are insulation -- psychic, emotional, physical. For those who believe books are superior to humans, they are also hard to unload. They are a link to the past, an escape from the present, a reminder of how much remains to be known. They make statements, intended or not.
''I can't see you to the door, really,'' explained Ann Douglas, a Columbia professor with 8,000 books in her one-bedroom apartment, maneuvering past a bookcase half-obstructing the front door. ''You know, in some sense, it could seem they were more important than you. And you know, in some sense, they are.''
The 1920's are in the hall, William James is in the kitchen (because he said philosophy was meant to be not a printed bill of fare but a hearty meal). ''In the bedroom initially it was all theology,'' Professor Douglas said. ''I thought, 'Sleep with God. That's the best plan.' ''
When Columbia paid to move her from Princeton, she says, the moving company classified her household as a small library and billed extra. ''I kept protesting: 'Look, I have a bed! There's a stove here!' '' she said recently. ''They said, 'Lots of libraries have beds.' ''
The problem starts innocently enough, as it did for Dalia Carmel. She arrived from Israel in 1960, not knowing, she says, how to boil water. A brochure from the Cookbook Club, addressed to Resident, landed in her mailbox, offering three books for a dollar if she signed up.
She picked the three biggest, figuring they would tell her the most. But others kept coming, as book-club books do. Then she discovered remainder tables.
Now her 4,500 cookbooks cram shelves in every room of the two-bedroom apartment she and her husband have occupied since 1978. Some nestle snugly against the ceiling.
There are entire sections devoted to subjects like ''pancakes'' and ''nuts.'' There are sections for Balkan, Turkish, Hawaiian cuisine. There are diplomatic cookbooks and expatriate cookbooks and books bought for a single recipe -- say, horseradish mousse.
Not long ago, Ms. Carmel (who now cooks rather well) noticed that her bread books were listing. To avert an avalanche, she reached up and gave them a shove. She tore her right rotator cuff, ended up in surgery and now finds herself in bookstores reading books she already has at home rather than risk re-injury by digging them out.
Continued below.
As soon as our printer is back in action I'm printing this out for my dh! He gripes about the abundance of books at OUR house-he should get a load of this! Back in March, I read a gorgeous book about personal libraries and was amazed at the collections of some bibliophiles from around the world. I'm not at home at the moment, or I could give the name of the book. It was reccomended by a guy in one of my yahoo book groups. Thanks for the article!
)
