William Marvel: Waiting, 1945

Bookcases and bookshelves cover all the open wall space on the first floor of my house, and every wall of the upstairs, including the closets. The books are largely arranged by category and subcategory, although some have to be shelved by size; most of the paperbacks have their own bookcases. Some might fit multiple categories, and when I need them, I often find them more by memory than by the logic of my organization. The shelves are all full. When a new title joins the collection, it can precipitate a wholesale reorganization, forcing me to choose between duplicate copies, or to decide whether I can stand to give away a book for which I’ve never yet found a use. 

A new book arrived a few days ago. It was a fairly slim volume — the last publication by an old friend of mine, about a soldier we both knew well. That soldier already has a few biographies, a couple of which sit side-by-side on the shelves I’ve reserved for Civil War biography, and putting it there would have initiated another endless shuffle. It wasn’t really a biography anyway, and didn’t fit any of the other genres in my collection, so I went down to the glass-front bookcase of miscellaneous titles beside the piano. The faded red spine of a book with a chipping dust jacket seemed the perfect size, so I pulled it out and found that the new one fit comfortably in its place.