Autumn makes me restless—I stare out the window and feel that I too am but a leaf waiting to be carried forth by the north winds, tossed to the heavens and then back down again. Always back down again. I lean to one side and my fingers tap the windowsill as though they know how to play the piano. I have an urge to go out and chop wood and stack it in long rows, though my furnace wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’m all the more restless this season because I can’t get the vision of the friar out of my mind—that inscrutable and sprightly fellow I saw at the bookstore downtown a few weeks ago. I have the strangest feeling he is here with me, crouching around the bookcase corners, browsing my books, about to ask whether I have any L.M. Montgomery. I think I might need a lifetime to prepare my answer.
Something I did not anticipate, when I adopted this trade, was the compulsion to shift the books about on shelves, to consider each book in relation to those around it, to rearrange and find just the right symmetry of spines. I’m at the far end of the commodity spectrum. This is housekeeping by another name, and with a melancholy tinge too because these books for sale online never are browsed by anyone but me. Selling books from home is my bit of sand-castle building, on a largely deserted island. Or rather, glass-blowing and sending the bottles on the waves one at a time.
Keep all the books in one place and the house is apt to get bedsores, I suppose. Maybe I take the business principle of moving inventory too literally. Perhaps this restlessness is inherent in a sedentary tapping-keyboard kind of livelihood. I have a fear of laziness and for all its easy-chair ways, bookselling can actually be an excellent way to keep in shape. All you have to do is to get the hankering, once in a while, to rearrange your books. Booksellers have a reputation for being a pasty-pastry sort, but I know one stalwart of our trade who gave up his gym membership in favor of bench-pressing the complete works of Kipling. There’s honesty in one’s body as much as one’s words, and moving books around hones the blade of that integrity.
So I have decided to arrange my books by color. Consider it a Rothko experiment. I have four rooms lined with bookshelves—there are only four rooms in my modest hacienda, not counting the kitchen and water closet—and each, I think, shall be devoted to a different piece of the color wheel pie, and I will know for certain where my green gables lie. I shall not stutter when the friar appears and puts forth his query. I will be ready.
