The Library Diaries Vol. 3: To The Drawing Board and Back

After resigning myself to having lost five or so boxes of books in the move (including two that contained eight volumes of the Complete Oxford English Dictionary), I diligently set about organising the south wall of my library with what was left of my hardcover English novels. With each letter I became more aware of what I had lost - books by many of my favourite authors simply weren't there. So I hit up the internet - Alibris and Abebooks - to track down new copies in fine condition of books that had long been out of print. I managed to find a fair few, and put in the orders. A few hundred bucks to ensure my library had good copies of books I loved seemed an understandable, if somewhat painful, sacrifice.

I'm betting you can guess what happened next. I went back to Dad's office and was checking the warehouse for those elusive volumes of the OED when one of the guys there asked what I was doing. After I had a fairly protracted whinge he asked whether I'd checked in the room 'over there'. Needless to say he was pointing in a direction that I didn't even know hid another room. "We had a spring clean a few months ago," he said. "I vaguely remember carting a stack of boxes in there." A mad scramble to find the key ensued and when I opened the door... Well, imagine the closing scene of Raiders of The Lost Ark but with boxes of books. I hadn't lost five or six boxes. I had lost about twenty. Suddenly my collection seemed far more immense that I remembered it. So began the great task of removing them and, suffice to say, I have never sweated so much in my life, and I managed to screw my back for the better part of a week. Thankfully the adrenalin kept me oblivious until that night.

In the library it was back to the drawing board for the south wall. Chaos ruled once again.

Another week was spent trawling through boxes; reorganising all my lost friends and carting books back and forth between my place and my parents'. Their shelves filled up quickly with my rejects (still good books, but not quite good enough to win space on my shelves). Two weeks later and I finally have a complete south wall.

So there you go. Hardcover editions (mostly firsts, many signed) of all my favourite novels written in English. Plus a bit of space to grow. Now I just have to work out what to do with all the doubles arriving daily in my mailbox!

The Library Diaries Vol. 2: Paperback Writers

A day off well spent...

I'm still toying with different configurations but for now I've lumped all the paperbacks together. I separated a few by publisher, just because they look nice as a set (check 'em out on the far right) and, contrary to my original intention to keep the library genre-free, I made one shelf of crime and fantasy. And, of course, there's a stack of books that simply didn't make the cut so they've been consigned to decorating my parents' shelves.

Anyway, enough reading the articles... Time for the book porn!

The Library Diaries Vol. 1: Random Stacks

Of the various dilemmas I have faced throughout my life, this has got to be the most bourgeoise: How will I organise my amazing new library? In my last place - a small apartment in Port Melbourne - I took a rather lassaiz faire approach to book storage, just stuffing them wherever there was space. In cupboards, drawers, on shelves, tables, the floor. See that doorstop? That's Tolstoy! Or David Foster Wallace. This propensity for obsessive, chaotic book hoarding was a hangover from my childhood home, where Mum used to joke that she lived with a husband, two sons, cats, snakes, ferrets and a veritable menagerie of books that, she maintained, reproduced faster than rabbits. When my parents finally moved out (they gave up on waiting for me to) and left me as caretaker, it only got worse. There wasn't a room that I didn't turn into a literary wasteland.

Last week, standing at the front door of the new house, I watched with glee as the removalists lugged box after box after box of books inside. Knowing that I don't have the room to store them all, I now need to work out a way to choose the books I most want on my library shelves and then decide how best to organise them. Do I group my favourites and keep them nearest to where I will be sitting? Do I just order my entire collection alphabetically? Or perhaps subdivide them geographically? Or by genre? Do I mix hardcover and paperback?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. For now I have to simply sort through them all and decide which are the keepers and which are to be sent into exile at Mum and Dad's, to line their bare shelves. And so it begins. Several thousand books. God knows how many days. Don't expect to see me round the traps for a while.

Day 1: The Sorting Begins

The Final Word on E-Reading

The most exciting thing about moving into my new digs is the library I had custom built in the middle of the place. Sixty-four shelves of dark oak, complete with rails and ladder will completely surround me from here on in and I couldn't be more chuffed. Naturally I'm struggling to work out how best to organise all my books, but I thought in the meantime I might take the chance to imagine a world without physical books. Turns out I now have a final, definitive argument against the KindlePad... Need I say more?