No Longer All the Time in the World

Today I am getting rid of books.

At about 2:30 this afternoon, a Twitter friend I’ve never met in real life will be rolling up to my driveway to carry away about six boxes full of works of theology, exegesis, Biblical studies, history of the ancient near east, linguistic studies, and general reference works.

Some highlights:  two different multi-volume Bible encyclopedias, one by Eerdmans and one by InterVarsity Press, IVP’s Dictionary of the Gospel’s, IVP’s Dictionary of the Pauline Epistles, Oxford University Press’s three-volume Dictionary of Byzantium, Thomas Oden’s three-volume systematic theology, Veli Matti Karkkainnen’s works of systematic theology and ecclesiology, the Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia (with emendations/corrections sheet), the Sacra Biblia (Hebrew OT/Koine Deuterocanonical and NT books), the Oxford history of the Biblical world, a Hebrew concordance, a pristine Liddell-Scott, and sundry other works.  In all, maybe eighty to one hundred volumes of a seminarian’s or pastor’s library, in excellent condition, many still bearing the price tags of a seminary bookstore.

It’s not that these works no longer interest me.  And it’s not really that I’ve run out of room—though that is very true.  I am downsizing, drastically, going from a 4400 square foot Texas McMansion to a 2000 square foot California ranch home surrounded by the fertile fields of the great Central Valley whose farmworkers and farmers feed the world.

It’s that I’ve run out of time.

I have done the math.  I am in my early fifties, and I’m writing what I anticipate will be my first of two, maybe three, books, if—as my grandfather would say—time lasts and I don’t die.  The first book manuscript might be finished seven years after I got my PhD. That feels slow, but I don’t guess it actually is.  The second book, when it comes, will be a good while after that. And it won’t be about the Pauline epistles or the cultures of Byzantium.

I simply don’t have time to pay attention to these books any more, and that’s a bigger constraint than not having shelf space.  One can always stack books, or double shelve them, or store them in the garage.  But that only makes sense if you know you’re going to make it through to the books behind the books.

If I live as long as my oldest grandparent did, I have thirty years left.  If I begin to struggle with dementia, as each of my grandparents did, I may have fifteen or twenty years at most of productive intellectual life.  That’s just not enough time to re-immerse myself in theology and exegesis for a project whose contours I could not even imagine at present, focused as I am on the history of American thought and culture.  So the books that could serve as the foundation for such a project are finally leaving my possession.  They are destined for the religious studies department of a local university, where graduate students who have many more years ahead of them can use the books in whatever way seems best.

All very well, you may be saying to yourself, but how is this a matter for the readers of the U.S. Intellectual History blog?

I think there are a few tie-ins here with our discipline.

First, this admittedly personal incident nevertheless raises the methodological matter of the textuality of a collection of books, alongside the textuality of any given book.  That is, when we’re thinking about the ideas that influenced our subjects, in addition to considering particular authors or works, we should consider the gestalt of the personal library as a whole, the ideas that a whole constellation of books might convey or signify by their presence on someone’s shelves.

In fact, Library Thing, the personal library cataloging tool, has a fantastic feature, “legacy libraries,” where museums, special collections departments, and historical societies have shared the complete catalog of library books of major historical figures.  One can see, for instance, which books both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson held in common.  Which Founding Fathers possessed a copy of Phyllis Wheatley’s poetry?  Who read Gibbon?  Who read Madame de Stael? Who read Voltaire in English, who read him in French? (The answer may surprise you.)  Such details make a difference in how we think about the intellectual milieu of the Early Republic.

Before moving, I focused on cataloging my working library, the “downstairs books” that I kept more easily available for my writing.  I only made it through about 1,000 of those, with maybe another 500 to go downstairs, before the movers came and packed up everything and pretty much mislabeled all of it.  (Upstairs office and downstairs office both got labeled as “office,” which has caused me no small trouble as I try to reassemble my sources.)

Every book I’m giving away is a book I did not catalog in LibraryThing.  I didn’t even take time to make a comprehensive list of what’s in these boxes.  I could have taken these books to Goodwill—that was my plan, if I didn’t find someone who would want them all.  But I wanted to keep them together because they work best together as a library, each volume filling in lacunae of other works in the collection.

That’s another key idea that comes up when considering libraries or book collections: not what do these books say (if anything) about the intellectual milieu of their owner/collector, but what do or can these books say about and to each other, whether their collector is aware of the intertextual implications or not?  A collection of books might yield sharply contradictory ideas, might pull mightily against the will or intentions or conscious commitments of the collector.  That tension is something best viewed by someone who is not the collector.

So I trust that, in this collection or through this collection, someone else will see things that I could not have seen as I put the collection together and kept it for many years after I had any use for it.

What I don’t know is how it will feel to no longer have my theological library on hand, “just in case.”  Will I miss it?  Will I miss having it but not using it?

Honestly, I think I will simply be relieved to have six fewer boxes of books for which I must find a place.  But I do think of these six boxes as a whole, a collection.  The other books I’m unpacking, works of American history, are still single volumes for me, though together they make quite an extensive library.  But I can easily cull one book or another from my “American Studies” library without feeling like I have done harm to the integrity of the whole.  Most volumes I will keep, I suppose, but I will not keep what I cannot use.  I simply don’t have room in my house, or my life, for the dead weight of unopened books.

No room, and no time.