How many books can you fit in an attic?
The number of books I’ve bought in my life must be at least 5,000. I suspect it’s twice that, but thinking about the cumulative total spent then makes me feel slightly ill, so I’ll take the conservative figure.
My wife’s number is not far off that. Then there are the times our parents have downsized to smaller houses, then flats, and we’ve added theirs. Add to that Christmas and birthday presents. Books given as presents by others to the children. 20,000?
If the first 20 years were mostly collecting, the last 20 years have been more “redistribution”. Because we don’t have 1000 feet or so of shelf space. There’s a spring clean every few years, weeding out a number for charity shops. There’s a continual migration of books in boxes to the attic, because how can you bear to give these ones away, you’re bound to want to reread them sometime.
But now the attic is full. And there’s all the other stuff that needs to go up there. The kids possessions/sports equipment/toys that surely must be needed by another generation sometime. There’s that baby chair that takes up a disproportionate amount of space, and the sledges, but they’ve come down through three generations….
And there’s the disturbing thought, given what a nightmare it’s been moving my mother over the last couple of weeks, having to fit everything (she really didn’t want to give anything up) into one quarter of the size, is this something you want to inflict on your own kids in decades to come? Shouldn’t we start sitting a bit more lightly on the earth now, rather than weighing it down?
If only someone could invent a way of getting all the books of the world into one, some kind of tablet where you could click on a button to find anything and read it. Never mind Gutenberg, it would be the biggest step forward since Moses bought the commandments down from Sinai.
John Hunt