Moving flats this weekend I was confronted with the objective reality of owning half a tonne of paper books without having a mansion to put them in. In the first part of the move I helped a strong man from Romania to carry my boxes of books up two storeys and put my back in agony for the next two days. Soon afterwards, in the gym, the trainer I am paying to make my back strong added extra weights to my routine. Yet when it came to the second part of the move – many more boxes of books – I didn’t add more weight to my load. I added another Romanian. He told me of one intellectual who’d got him to carry 60 boxes of books, each weighing 40 kilogrammes, up to the fifth floor of a block of flats, without seeming to think she was asking him to do anything remarkable.
The feel, weight and smell of my own paper books in my hand, some of them old friends I haven’t seen for years, is a joy. As physical books I can not only keep them and reread them but give them away, lend them to people, take them to second-hand booksellers. But there are lines I would rather not cross: walls of books on more than two sides, for instance, or a sound from the floorboards like the imminent fall of a sawn-out Redwood pine when I slot the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past into its place. The rise of the ebook offers the chance to be ruthless in the personal paper library without losing the ability to keep text. On the urban bookshelves of the crowded future world only the loved and the beautiful will survive.
Read the full essay at LRB.
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