Sunday, April 10, 2016

Cleaning Bookcases

I have finished breakfast. (Bread toasted with butter and marmalade. Coffee, of course.) Now it's time to get back to work on cleaning the book shelves. I figure it will take five days to finish all the bookcases, working at an easy pace. Then I plan to devote five days to cleaning up the stacks of paper I have, also my files. If I put in three or four hours a day, I will have time for writing.
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I'm onto my second shelf, which is literary criticism and then politics. I'm not finding books to get rid of. Either the books are something I may want to read again or they have emotional content -- books by friends, books my mother gave me, books that were important to me at one time.
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I am finding a fair number of bookmarks. Most of them I understand. They are from the World Wildlife Fund or ones I bought as souvenirs. One shows four turkeys crossing a road in southern Minnesota. Clearly a souvenir from a day trip. But I don't know why I was using a leaflet for Lifestyle Condoms as a bookmark.
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I found a book of Mona van Duyn poetry mis-shelved. There is one poem in it I really like, so I was happy to find it. Another book my mother gave me.
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I have now found a notice of attempt to deliver mail to me, which I have used as a bookmark. It's for an address in Detroit. I can't make out the year on the date stamp, but it has to be 1968 or 69.
My whole life is in these books, and I haven't even gotten to science fiction.
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I found a photo of Captain Kirk, obviously off a TV screen, tucked into Vol. 1 of Spenser's Faerie Queene.

1 Comments:

Blogger JB said...

Huh. I wonder what I'd discover if I ever took the time to clean MY bookshelves!

6:18 AM  

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