Books have an infinite capacity to
change how we think and live, but they are also finite objects with dimensions
There
was a time when I knew exactly how many books I had. I carried a list around
because I wanted to know because my budget for books was my budget for living.
I managed everything else so that I should have money for books and I didn’t
want to duplicate books. How can you duplicate books, you might ask, if you
have only two or three hundred? Easily enough if you find a book by P.G.
Wodehouse called The Cat-nappers , enter into a long haggling session
with the road-side second-hand book-seller, finally arrive at a decent price,
get into the train, find a window-seat, take out the book and discover that you
have bought the American edition of Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen .
Today,
I am not sure how many books I have, and I would buy that version of the
Wodehouse just to see what the editors had got up to. There are dozens of books
I have bought, some from the streets, some from the shops, ‘just to see’. This
was not the way it was, not the way I was. I would only buy if I could be
reasonably sure I would keep the book. This means knowing that I would return
to the book, would want to read it again.
Perhaps
the change has something to do with the way my relationship with books has
changed. To begin with, re-reading is a luxury these days. Those books are
clamouring for my attention and when I am done, most of the time, I know I will
not return to the book and so I have to look for a place for it.
Now
this should be easy but it is not. Many of my friends who have lost their
parents call up and say that they have books to give away, could I please find
a library that would take them. Sometimes this is because they know I am a
trustee of the People’s Free Reading Room and Library, sometimes it is because
I am a book person. Most of the time I have to tell them that most libraries
don’t have room.
Imposing monuments
It
is true that the great libraries of the world were built by donations, but it
is also true that they were built at a time when it seemed that people and
politicians and even kings believed in making books available to the public.
Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, for instance, was impressed by the public
library system in the United States, and got William Borden (classmate of
Melvil Dewey, who invented the Dewey Decimal System) over to help develop
libraries in the State of Baroda. You look at the buildings that housed the
libraries built back in the day and you can see that they were meant to be
imposing monuments to learning. Perhaps they were also meant to impress the
user into a position of subservience and quietness and respectful silence, but
they were built so that more books could be added as you went along.
But
even those big buildings have their limits. Books have an infinite capacity for
changing the way we think and the way we live, but they are also finite objects
with dimensions. You can end up with too many books and then you want to give
them away. You’re done with Ayn Rand? But then so are 10,000 other people of
your generation, and they have all been giving their copies ofThe Fountainhead and Atlas
Shrugged to the same libraries you’re thinking of. And so most libraries
can give you no guarantee that the books you give them will end up on their
shelves. After all, they have to invest a certain amount of time in
accessioning a book, entering it into the catalogue, classifying it and putting
it on the shelves. If it is not read, it will have cost them that much money in
time of human labour.
Most
heartbreaking are the once-loved collections of aunts and fathers and
grandparents which are now simply no longer wanted by the younger generations.
Book hunger
Sometimes
they take the best books, the first editions if they are intelligent, or the
books that look like they are old and expensive if they are not. Then they ask
you if you know a place which will take the World Book Encyclopedia of
1964 or the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1975.
“It’s
a full set,” they say. “And things have not changed that much, you know...”
No?
I want to say. Then perhaps your children could use it?
Anyway,
sometimes it is possible to find recipient libraries because we are a nation of
book hunger, but often it is difficult to find ways in which to get books—paper
can be remarkably heavy, as anyone who has tried to heft a schoolchild’s
satchel will know—to the mofussil.
Thanks
to Marie Kondo and her kind, there is now much interest in getting rid of
things. This was not so in an earlier generation where everything from bits of
string to old underwear was kept because it might ‘come in handy some day’.
The
resultant clutter was enormous, as anyone who has tried to clear up an older
person’s house will know. Libraries then find that they have been handed
everything from laundry lists to college guides to the classics.
The
urge to clean out has one concomitant problem: you have to put the clutter out
of your space, and if it does not go into someone else’s where it will be used,
it will become dirt.
Can
a book be dirt? If it is in the wrong place, it is. My solution is to give my
old books to places which have jumble sales. If an Indian is willing to pay
something for a book, it is in the right place. In a reader’s hands. Again.
Source: THE HINDU-17th March,2019
