Down with the Sickness (To Thine Own Shelf Be True)

A shadow of the sickness.

"Let me tell you a little about my books."

-Steve Zissou, paraphrased

It’s a sickness really—the hoarding of books. There are many places where my collection is spread—from my office to two different attics to a church building. My collection began, I suppose, from always loving having books around me as a child. I couldn’t read them well, but that came with time. Going to the library was not enough. I had to own books. I’ve bought them, traded them, bid on them, stolen them. The evidence of the influence of books is everywhere in my life.

The collection circa 2014.

Then, did I mention two teachers retired leaving me their separate collections—one on the theatre and the other on religion?

I am slowly bringing all the books down from the attics to one central location, but I wonder how they’ll all fit. 3,000 books is a conservative estimate.

A stash in the closet. I forgot to mention that one. And, yes, that is the original Star Wars trilogy on VHS with no edits.

There are some books I cherish more than others of course—my copies of the Baptist Hymnal (perhaps the most influential book in my life in many ways), my full collections of authors’ works and a handful of signed books as well—works by Tony winners David Henry Hwang and James Lapine, Obie winner Craig Lucas, playwright/fiction writer/filmmaker Neil LaBute, humorist Lewis Grizzard, singer/actress Carol Channing, novelist/screenwriter Mark Jude Poirier, producer and biographer Steven Bach—plus a signed copy of a play in which I am thanked, a Pulitzer finalist book from my playwriting teacher, and various first editions (Jay McInerney, Norman Mailer, etc). And then, there are the books that I live by: the ones I read the most—eclectic titles include Music by Philip Glass (by Philip Glass), Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (the greatest English prose ever written), Ulysses (the greatest novel of all time), Jerry Seinfeld’s Seinlanguage, The Norton Shakespeare, Raymond Carver’s final work A New Path to the Waterfall, George Pierce Baker’s seminal Dramatic Technique, John Gassner’s rare Masters of the Drama, and a handful of books by friends and books forever out of print due to legal issues.

A special little place. Sondheim and the yearbooks of all the schools I attended through '21 and the one in which I taught.

When moving my stuff to Montgomery in 2014, we did not think of the weather and a good 1/5 of my collection was destroyed by rain, including many precious textbooks and books of photography. My mother couldn’t understand why I was so upset. My brother says, “It’s his life.” I guess he’s right. Yes, I listen to audiobooks voraciously and I indulge very rarely in ebooks, but my true heart is with the smell of bound pages, sometimes a century old. I’ll probably die under a collapsed bookshelf, but that would be prudent. Here’s to many more years of reading before that happens!

The book I'm tackling now for my #365scripts project.

In a strange way, I can compare the sickness of book collecting with writing. I have written two books—one small theoretical book on playwriting (the world needs more books about plumbers than playwrights) and a scholarly work on Scripture. With the last one, which was full-length, my back would ache, my fingers would cramp, my eyes got worse, I laid awake looking at it on another app, perfecting punctuation. But it reminded me of something Spalding Gray said about writing his novel Impossible Vacation: “it’s disgusting.”

A still life. The next few books plus a monkey and a duck decoy.

Still, I am not here without these books and this will to write. To a dusty shelf we aspire and, although, my shelf is mostly empty, I’ve thrown a few pieces out into the world until someone discovers me or I discover them. So, I am a part of my own shelf in an addition to my own self.