The Bed of Books, Round Two.
I live in a house where it is fast becoming impossible to give presents.
Almost every flat, non-floor surface is covered by a random mixture of technology, pottery, art, CDs, clothing, and, above all, books. Books on shelves, books on tables, books on bookcases, books on books, books on technology, books on the floor, in every room. Only my parents' bedroom remains a fortress against the tide of bookshelves. And yet, even there, little stacks of magazines and bedside books linger and lurk on the flanks, waiting to pounce.
This has become spectacularly apparent over the past week or so, and especially so this evening. Some weeks or months ago, the Parentage decided that the lower floors were especially scruffy and had seen enough wear and use over the past two decades of inhabitance. Thus, it was decreed that the boards should be waxed, the walls stripped and repainted, and the sideboards polished to a beauteous shine. All would look upon the glory of this and rejoice!
Of course, this meant work. Moving tables, chairs, sofas, more tables, technology, three towers of clattering, shaking CDs, all shifted out to the dining room or other distant outposts of the house, during which my father emerged as a master stacker/arranger, slotting massive chairs and slender tables together like a relaxing game of three dimensional Tetris. Of course, this all meant books had to migrate. As they were mostly broad coffee-table books of varying thickness, and the back room was required for Essential Activities (hooray World Cup!) everything mobile was lugged and manhandled up to my room and roughly dumped in waist-high stacks. So, for the past week I've been living in a room that is essentially a bunk bed with a metre-broad catwalk of floorspace for changing, turning around, and computer use.
It's surprisingly survivable.
And so we lived for the past week, dinners outside, shuffling to sleep past books and records, while the front room, bare and blank, echoed unnervingly and resounded with sanders, waxers, painters, decorators and their tools. Finally, Friday came and all was bare and beautiful, the last dregs of Arts and Crafts design stripped down to waxed boards and white walls. The bare minimum was festooned with felt and pads and swung back into place, slowly revealing the monster at the house's heart, the Book Wall, twelve mind-guzzling square metres of literature, slowly and steadily accumulated over some fifty years of literacy. Slowly, this mass crawled from the bookshelves, gave up years of dust to a rough vacuum cleaner and swarmed up the stairs, colonising the back room, as my own load did years ago in the Bed of Books incident. Thanks to the courageous efforts of a lone bookcase, the door remains closeable, and a small amount of space remains for reaching and landing. Now, something will be done about the dining room, which will probably be slower to complete, what with lingering furniture and bookshelves.
Now all that remains is for us to wait and occasionally peer into the backroom, where the million-paged beast lies sprawled, and plan for the moment when it will have to be moved back to its rightful place, hopefully in some semblance of order. In the meantime, the calendar slides smoothly on, slowly gaining on the days of gift-giving, when yet more books will creep into the house in solid form and accrete like creeping lichen, across more and more of the house, until some moment, decades from now, when it is nothing more than a shell of stone, slate and wood, encrusted around a solid mass of books.
Almost every flat, non-floor surface is covered by a random mixture of technology, pottery, art, CDs, clothing, and, above all, books. Books on shelves, books on tables, books on bookcases, books on books, books on technology, books on the floor, in every room. Only my parents' bedroom remains a fortress against the tide of bookshelves. And yet, even there, little stacks of magazines and bedside books linger and lurk on the flanks, waiting to pounce.
This has become spectacularly apparent over the past week or so, and especially so this evening. Some weeks or months ago, the Parentage decided that the lower floors were especially scruffy and had seen enough wear and use over the past two decades of inhabitance. Thus, it was decreed that the boards should be waxed, the walls stripped and repainted, and the sideboards polished to a beauteous shine. All would look upon the glory of this and rejoice!
Of course, this meant work. Moving tables, chairs, sofas, more tables, technology, three towers of clattering, shaking CDs, all shifted out to the dining room or other distant outposts of the house, during which my father emerged as a master stacker/arranger, slotting massive chairs and slender tables together like a relaxing game of three dimensional Tetris. Of course, this all meant books had to migrate. As they were mostly broad coffee-table books of varying thickness, and the back room was required for Essential Activities (hooray World Cup!) everything mobile was lugged and manhandled up to my room and roughly dumped in waist-high stacks. So, for the past week I've been living in a room that is essentially a bunk bed with a metre-broad catwalk of floorspace for changing, turning around, and computer use.
It's surprisingly survivable.
And so we lived for the past week, dinners outside, shuffling to sleep past books and records, while the front room, bare and blank, echoed unnervingly and resounded with sanders, waxers, painters, decorators and their tools. Finally, Friday came and all was bare and beautiful, the last dregs of Arts and Crafts design stripped down to waxed boards and white walls. The bare minimum was festooned with felt and pads and swung back into place, slowly revealing the monster at the house's heart, the Book Wall, twelve mind-guzzling square metres of literature, slowly and steadily accumulated over some fifty years of literacy. Slowly, this mass crawled from the bookshelves, gave up years of dust to a rough vacuum cleaner and swarmed up the stairs, colonising the back room, as my own load did years ago in the Bed of Books incident. Thanks to the courageous efforts of a lone bookcase, the door remains closeable, and a small amount of space remains for reaching and landing. Now, something will be done about the dining room, which will probably be slower to complete, what with lingering furniture and bookshelves.
Now all that remains is for us to wait and occasionally peer into the backroom, where the million-paged beast lies sprawled, and plan for the moment when it will have to be moved back to its rightful place, hopefully in some semblance of order. In the meantime, the calendar slides smoothly on, slowly gaining on the days of gift-giving, when yet more books will creep into the house in solid form and accrete like creeping lichen, across more and more of the house, until some moment, decades from now, when it is nothing more than a shell of stone, slate and wood, encrusted around a solid mass of books.