That lovely phrase comes from British writer Susie Boyt, who was talking about her notebooks. It came to mind as I was wrestling with a small room in the house at Stone Mountain that is becoming a library or study. It’s a quiet place where I can read, think and write.
More urgent things — gas and electrical service, drivers licenses and such — had to come first. But, if you have a cast of mind like mine, you get to the point where you can’t go on until your books are on shelves and your notebooks are in order.
And so I covered two walls with floating shelves, floor to ceiling, eight shelves on each wall. I used 8-foot boards on the north wall and 6-footers on the south. In total, more than 100 feet of shelves.
My books just fit, with some cheating. Some of my “prettier” books — mostly a collection of books of photographs, heavy on Walker Evans — were deemed worthy of inclusion in a bookcase in the living room.
The notebooks — more than 100 — take up too much space on the bookshelves and so must live in a separate case.
• Source: Philip Horne, Paul Theroux, Susie Boyt and Amit Chaudhuri, “’Messy attics of the mind’: what’s inside a writer’s notebook?”; The Guardian, 6 April 2018.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/06/tales-masters-notebooks-stories-henry-james
No comments:
Post a Comment