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| Still Life (The Grey Fan) – Francis Cadell |
“Yet one fearful characteristic of the physical world tempers any optimism that a reader may feel in any ordered library: the constraints of space. It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books. This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the world, then ultimately its task must be redundant, since it can only be satisfied when the library’s borders coincide with those of the world itself.”
So true……… My shelves are inadequate at the moment and this is after I've had a clear out :( But I really *must* read this rather wonderful sounding book!
Yes, there is a certain irony to this excerpt making you want to ADD to your shelves, isn't there?
Hmm, more shelf space would be nice – but, as the man says, I'd only fill it up again…
Tony, you wouldn't have to fill it up again. It would fill itself while you went for a coffee.
Ha! So true, both of you – shelves refuse to stay empty. I can't imagine what an empty bookcase would look like in my house…
So strange, isn't it. Last month I did a big rearrangement of my bookshelves, and when I finished refulling them all to the max, I found 15-20 books still lying on the table nearby.
I got rid of 100 last year, and the gap they made was about four books wide…