Damaged in transit

I have been unpacking my library. Because not all of the bookcases have been built, I have just been getting the books out of their boxes in random order. The job has been slowed by the depressing sight of opening each new box. The packers for the van lines did not know what they were doing. My wife says they did not think of books as having any value. Although they wrapped our paintings with extreme care—only because they were framed behind glass, if you ask me—they tossed my books into the boxes any which way. They picked up whole rows and dropped them on their tails with the spines rubbing against the box. Then they piled books on top of them, regardless of any difference in the sizes of the books. The results are dozens of crushed, bent, cocked, and torn books, many with their spines rubbed white from bouncing up and down for twelve hundred miles.

My experience, then, has not been Walter Benjamin’s. Instead of being reminded where I bought a book, and the circumstances under which I read it, I am reduced to asking whether I can afford to replace it. The first edition of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays was a gift from an old flame, who inscribed it. Does it really matter if it now looks like my wife backed over it in a fit of anger? A hip and glossy study of abstract expressionism looks as if I had thrown it across the room repeatedly. As I recall, that’s pretty much what I wanted to do at the time. Has history been added to my library, or only mimicked?

“It is amazing how books can change the way a room looks,” my wife said. She was marvelling at the whole collection. I am distraught at the fate of a few.