Bookstores make me edgy. It wasn’t until my midtwenties that I realized not everyone starts to itch upon entering a bookstore. I thought people claimed to like “browsing” in the sarcastic way they claimed to enjoy something “as much as a stick in the eye.” I blame my father. Or rather, I blame my father’s bookshelves.
In my memory, the bookshelves and books appeared simultaneously. I recall my father coming home with a hippie home-improvement guide and a Datsun laden with 2-bys and plywood. There was a week of drilling and sawing, and when the commotion died down, a legion of towering, unvarnished bookcases stood quartered temporarily in the back room. They were very tall. Their bases were very narrow. It occurred to me, a child who had only recently grasped the concept of staying upright, to think, “I’d hate to live in the house where those are going.” Over the next few days, I watched in horror as my father turned them vertically, balanced them gingerly against the walls of our house, and piled them with dense rows of transcendentalist literature and hydroponic gardening guides.
The question that children of do-it-yourself dads must eventually settle had finally arisen: Was my father trying to kill me? I had no choice but to toe the father-knows-best line, even when it meant ignoring the bookcases swaying around me, as well as the data I’d amassed—through careful experimentation on my Schwinn—concerning centers of gravity, axes of rotation, and the gravitational constant. I arrived at this seemingly unintuitive decision with the diamond logic of youth. Premises: 1) I didn’t feel like running away and 2) my limited kindergarten education meant I was working with imperfect knowledge. Conclusion: The bookshelves were probably safer than they looked.
“They were strapped to the wall,” my father reassured me recently when I called to level belated charges of child endangerment.
“Even the ones on the second floor?” my mother asked from the phone in the kitchen, “or the one that used to stand in the upstairs hall?”
It hadn’t occurred to my father that a falling bookshelf could crush a small child as easily at altitude as at ground level. “I absolutely secured the cases in the upstairs guest room,” my dad started out, but lost resolve midsentence, “I think.”
“I’m just going to go up and check,” my mother said tensely and hung up the phone.
I’d managed to tap into my mother’s deep well of neglectful-parent anxiety. My dad, on the other hand, seemed uninterested in retroactive guilt. He was like a gunfighter who’s dodged so many bullets, he takes his luck for granted. My sister and I had survived; the bookshelves could be suspended from the ceiling by fraying thread for all he cared. But since I was on the phone asking about them, maybe he could finally get someone to appreciate their revolutionary design. “The problem with most bookcases,” he began in the earnest voice of a man with a Clever Solution, “is that they waste a lot of space. Mine had shallower shelves, so that the books weren’t buried back inside the unit, and they were set at predetermined heights—some shelves were as tall as a standard paperback, some as a trade paperback, and some were the height of standard hardback—see,” he claimed triumphantly, “no wasted space.”
But why was my father boasting so proprietarily about a design that wasn’t his own? Hadn’t he lifted it from the hippie carpentry book?
“Book? What book? You couldn’t find that design in a book,” scoffed my father, his pride wounded. “No one in their right mind builds 8-foot-tall bookshelves with bases that narrow.”
My mother’s voice came back on the kitchen phone, “There are four bookshelves upstairs,” she said, “none are strapped to the wall.”
My father had a ton of books, perhaps literally. I grew up beneath the constant surveillance of the printed word. The entire Folger Library peeked from its Standard Paperback rack at toe level, while 8 feet above, a thick ledge of oversized art books jutted precariously past the brink of its innovatively narrow shelf. One venture into the basement even led to the discovery of a secret room, cramped and dusty, piled floor to ceiling with bulging cardboard boxes of moldy paperbacks. In his short story “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges tells of a library so infinite, it’s a world unto itself. Its lands are identical hexagonal rooms stretching infinitely in all directions, lined floor to ceiling with books. These books contain every possible combination of letters, and thus, all of reality. This story is a geometric equation rendered in prose, a metaphor expanded into short story. But for me, when its narrator says, “The certitude that everything has been written negates us and turns us into phantoms,” he’s not speaking symbolically. He’s telling the story of my life.
This is not to say that living in a world of books was all bad. The world’s knowledge lined the walls of my dining room. This was very handy for school reports. More importantly, I felt I lived on the verge of something. When my house creaked at night I could imagine it was with the weight of undiscovered truths lurking on a remote shelves. It was even conceivable I’d eventually get to them. My field of inquiry, though vast, was manageable. The Truth was a fairly shiny needle in a relatively small haystack. I maintained that fiction until I entered my first bookstore, at which point I realized that my parents’ house was not a whole unto itself, but simply an entrance way to the infinite Library of Babel. The whole world, it turned out, was made of hay.
I know what you’re thinking: Danielle Steele? The Art of the Deal? All those Bob Greene collections? Surely most of the titles in any bookstore can be eliminated as paths to the palace of wisdom. Again, my man Borges has the answer. “[Their] phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner . . . I cannot combine some characters—dhcmrlchtdj—which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god.” If Bob Greene doesn’t supply the meaning to Mohammed, Mohammed must supply the meaning to Bob Greene. I actually don’t buy that notion. The concept that The Bridges of Madison County, if interpreted using the right Rosetta stone, is the word of God, leads quickly down the path of relativism ad absurdum. But even if you maintain a belief in absolutes, the bookstore is your enemy.
The problem is simply this. Nothing in extreme abundance has meaning. Each new book on the racks, rather than adding to the body of knowledge, only serves to obscure it. The world of letters becomes a TV image made snowy by spurious data. The redundancies compound, the truth dissipates. Even if we reject the notion of relativism, it is crammed down our throats by the sheer volume of information. So browse away. Don your bifocals, sip your coffee, and skim a volume of Rilke or Windows for Dummies. With each new title, those before lose their individual meanings and become simple terms in an infinite series, so many lexical permutations inundating the shelves of Barnes & Noble like a tide. Meanwhile, the book we’re all looking for becomes harder and harder to locate. Eventually, we’ll become like the official inquisitors in the “Library of Babel,” those charged with the task of finding the one volume, which the law of probability says must exist, in which the secret to the universe is revealed. “I have seen them in the performance of their function,” Borges’ narrator writes, “they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.” When that happens, we can all adopt my dad’s formula and arrange our books by size.
Alex Blumberg is a contributor to GQ and This American Life.
