Aug
31st
Tue
31st
Negotiating my friend Andy’s abandonment of his lifetime of books, and my own deranged tendency to keep everything, as if to prove that I existed, I have set myself a limit to my shelf space– a generous one by the average person’s standards, but a limit nonetheless. Each month I carve out a little more length and unbox a few more treasures. It’s a slow process. But there is a finite point. And the rest must go. Cool stuff rears up out of the cardboard. I had forgotten, for example, that I had every album the Volcano Suns ever made, reprints of all Barry Windsor Smith’s Conan comics, and more than a dozen hardback copies of Francis Brett Young’s Shropshire novels that I have never read. These finds thrill me still, just as when I was a boy. I know I will never absorb all my archive, but it’s enough to bask in its glow. But philosophically I remain none the wiser than I did when I first racked my Marvel comics on the wall of my bedroom, aged eight or nine. To paraphrase Larkin: “What are shelves for? Ah, solving that question/brings the priest and the doctor/in their long coats/running over the fields.
