But a coupole of things were going on that weren’t so nice. The first was the recurring dreadful experience of categorical ambiguties that has plagued every collector for millennia. Where does this book belong? Is it one of the things desired by the Emperor or a history of an inconsequential happening or spomething designed as a perfect square? Is it a volume in the Blue Jade Library, that collection of racist and vaguely antiquarian texts reprinted by Alfred A Knopf in the 1920s, just at the time when they were publishing Spengler’s Decline of the West? Or is it just plain French — NRF, Pleiades, Plon, etc? Which are the books I intend to read but haven’t got to yet? Michel de Certeau — seriously? Isn’t it a little late for that? Which are the monuments to my past enthusiasms, now (nearly) dead? The library of Borges obviates this problem to some degree by making all the boks exactly the same size and format, so no distracting visual associations, no seductions or demands, like those Konemann books whose spines shout BAUHAUS and BAROQUE ART in huge letters and shame you with your enormous ignorance about fabric design in Dessau and isn’t Sophie Tauber Arp the greatest artist of the twentieth century?

But really, the problem is, where do you stop? If I was willing to sell all my Don Delillo books which were so important to me when I first discovered him in the basement of the Strand in 1971, then what should I not sell? There are only a handful of books (I was forced to admit) that I felt I “couldn’t do without” and I wasn’t sure what they were. Most of them I had already given away anyway to people who probably had no idea what the gesture meant Vergil the Necromancer, the Collected Poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Sleepwalkers all went to people who didn’t deserve them or wouldn’t remember me anymore and how I grabbed them by the arm, waved the book at them, and said “You HAVE to read this! It will change your life.” (I’m not so sure it changed mine.) Shouldn’t I have sold everything I had to buy that copy of Blake’s poems from the early 1800s, with engravings? And wouldn’t it have been so much easier to divest if I had that copy of the Shakespeare and Company Ulysses that my wife was going to steal from the library in Besancon. Or, to get even more into the fantasy, a copy of Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature? It was probably affordable back when I first started to buy books compulsively (that phrase is either an oxymoron or redundant).

To look at my rooms, you wouldn’t know what I’m going through. I don’t seem to have made a dent. There are books open all over the place, with stuff stuck between the pages (broken eyeglasses, crayons, CDs) and books piled up like pagodas with cups and shoes perched on them. Just like the catalogues. I can’t find anything. People (some) say the clutter looks quaint, just like a real writer. But I look at the catalogues and say, you mad, impetuous fools, don’t let these vampires into your home. They will take over. Your life will have no content and they will have it all. That’s when I begin to dream of day when the books all turn their spines to the wall ands become anonymous, as if to say, forget us. You’re on your own now.

And also the ways in which we think about books, as ideas, objects -even more so today in the age of information. Looking at these images, I experience the same kind of feeling when looking at images of ruins. Desire, nostalgia, passage of time, utopic idealism. Interesting that a book
can have a similar impact.

Books gender. No doubt these r simulacra for exchange and fit the reality-is-a-construct kind of argument, but if u wanted fodder for the gender is a social construct thesis, PBTeen offers a lot. Books serve as topical markers for career path, well educated, female consumers, while tints of pink, blue and lemony green paint a loud ‘Girl Country’. Boys get deeper shades of gray and blue, serious, almost moody. Drug titles r forbidden like bongs. As a teen u will know what u should be reading depending on your gender. And, PBTeen polices the borders on sexuality, Household is between a man and a woman, Heterosexuality rules. What the books never suggest is LGBT or how to be in drag and still nail the interview. I’m guessing the books r vacuous , as mentioned above, to a certain degree, but they also serve to reinstate heterogemeny.

Race and Class: Again the books serve both functions as it is clear who would read these sign posts and, thus, who can afford the affluent abundance of ersatz culture. Privileging has its members. White well funded or credit stretched middle class who r heterosexual. However, my fav on class sex race is LLBean. The only blacks r Denzel and Mrs. Denzel clones, w/ no Asians and Hispanics to be seen, unless Cal. versions cater differently. And, no LLBian of any sort.

This looks great. Congratulations

Randy