The library was a map of my life as a reader, and later a writer

October 25, 2018 9:58 AM

Jeff Abbott, best-selling author of mysteries and thrillers, had amassed a personal library of more than 2,500 books. Then his house was struck by lightning, and he had to restart the "annex to [his] imagination" from scratch.
posted by Etrigan (9 comments total)

I too have a personal library loss tale, but it's much more mundane than Jeff Abbott's. I had a wardrobe box full of books that I'd carried from apartment to apartment for years. James Ellroy, Stephen King, sci-fi paperbacks I'd never read, and more. It was quite heavy; I remember when I moved into my first LA apartment, my brother and I each hefted up either end of the box, and we found ourselves sprinting up the driveway, barely getting through the automatic gate as it closed like in one of those silent comedies from the 1920s, just cracking up at the abuse we were putting ourselves through hauling this thing around.

Years later, I found myself planning a move across the city, and I convinced myself that carrying all those books to yet another place would be a major pain. So I loaded all the books into two pieces of luggage, drove them to the Last Bookstore, and sold them. At the time it seemed like the rational thing to do, but to this day I regret that decision.

I have a Kindle now, which I read occasionally, but it doesn't get nearly as much play as my old box of books did. Honestly, my enthusiasm for reading has kind of left me; I feel a bit unmoored without my old collection, like Abbott. Losing a collection of books really is qualitatively different from other types of losses.
posted by miltthetank at 10:20 AM on October 25, 2018 [4 favorites]

My books would be a great loss, but I could rebuild my library almost entirely if I absolutely had to. I lived without most of them for six months when I moved countries, so I know I can. That said, my audio cassettes disappeared in a move either six or eight years ago, not sure anymore, and many of those are impossible to replace. I wish I could even look at the covers of some of the mix tapes I had. Oof.
posted by wellred at 10:36 AM on October 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

I’m a musician/songwriter/composer, and I had a very similar experience when my dad’s storage flooded in midwinter, destroying the record collection of 30 years I’d entrusted to his care while starting my life anew in California. Like Abbott, these records weren’t just an index of my tastes, but the most important keys to the history of my life. The list of circumstances and acquisitions mirrors his: records I’d had since childhood, pivotal albums that had been put in my tween-aged hands by the mentors/clerks at my local indie record shop, limited-edition and uncirculated and one-off pressings, remixes and first editions and things lovingly acquired, one by one, over decades of travel and digging and coincidence and online bartering and, near the end, eBay. Even if the music was technically replaceable (although many times it wasn’t, even in the peak age of vinyl blogs), these were the particular copies I held in my growing hands. They had price stickers and receipts and all the particular quirky qualities of their acquisition. They were bought for me when I was blue by my mom (deceased) and occasionally chewed on by my cat (also deceased). And once those records were gone, reduced to impossibly heavy bricks of pulp under feet of water, so went any interest I ever had in curating or owning material things. My adult life has been characterized by countless moves around town and across the country, solo and with various partners, and there’s honestly never been room for anything like a massive record collection. I’ve never even owned a turntable after age 25. So perhaps it’s for the best, in some perverse way, but it still pains me to think about that loss, and how it permanently broke the part of me that could take solace in surrounding myself with sentimental objects.
posted by mykescipark at 11:40 AM on October 25, 2018 [10 favorites]

There's a proverb, "when an old man dies, a library burns".

Maybe the inverse is also true.
posted by chavenet at 2:03 PM on October 25, 2018 [4 favorites]

I've never been that sentimentally attached to objects, not even books. I think I must be a serious outlier in that regard. Living in a quite-small NYC apartment forces you to be pretty ruthless about physical books. I would be irritated about losing notes, though. My copy of The Golden Bowl has meticulous annotation of the inversion of every concrete metaphor from the first half of the book in the second. I couldn't bring myself to do that again! And the notes in my Greek texts reflect hard-won thinking. But if I could snap my fingers and reimpose the, uh, critical apparatus on new copies of all the volumes, I doubt I'd be very upset.
posted by praemunire at 2:13 PM on October 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

This article depicts one of my greatest fears. In print I own about 3,000 books, similarly accumulated through my life, likewise freighted with memories and work.

They are all in storage now, thanks to the wretched process of house selling, and their separation from me is like losing a hand.
posted by doctornemo at 4:30 PM on October 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm with doctornemo, above. This is also one of my fears. I honestly don't know how many books I own, though it must be in the hundreds. At least. Like the writer, I prefer an actual book in my hands as opposed to a Kindle. I have books collected from childhood; I have books dating to the 1700s. I have a book from the early 1900s with house plans coming in the mail that I can't wait to see. I'd be lost without my collection around me.
I think I'll start cataloging them, as the article suggested, just in case.
posted by annieb at 6:26 PM on October 25, 2018

Needs the horror tag.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:11 PM on October 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

.
posted by limeonaire at 12:21 AM on October 26, 2018