Franz Kafka? Just Look Next to Dave Barry

As a child I was never able to master a coloring book. I am not sure whether it was due to my inquiring mind venturing off the paths indicated, or that my eye/hand coordination sucked. I did lean toward the former rationale, however, believing that my roaming Crayolas were in large part due to creative leanings which would eventually bear fruit.


Consequently, my frustration with coloring books led to my love of those other books-- books of text, books where there was no need to reach into my box of many colors and experience near catatonic trepidation. This romance with the bound word led me to my current undertaking-- born from a concept that I happened on, you might say, not unlike how Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity.


It came to me after installing new bookshelves above the desk in my den. I noticed that the books appeared to overwhelm the shelves-- what with the white brackets, white shelves, and white walls contrasted against the dominating colors of the book jackets. This color scheme made my installation appear somewhat shaky, and it occurred to me that a loosened screw or two could send an avalanche of books from the top shelf crashing down on me.



Concerned, I removed the books and stacked them back on the floor. I thought about putting my paperbacks on the upper tiers, but there's a total of twenty-four feet of new shelving. That's room for more than two hundred books, and organizing according to book-weight would not be an efficient way of finding anything. I sat amidst the stacks of books-- some three hundred-- thinking of ways to arrange them that wouldn't leave me suffering a concussion.

As I picked up The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Thus Spake Zarathustra, a silly thought arose. Some words, I mused, are heavier than others; which led me to think that I'd rather get walloped by the lighter prose of Mark Twain than the weightiness of Friedrich Nietzsche's. Of course, the meanings of words are physically weightless-- it's the hundreds of pages wrapped in stiff binders that would do me harm. I'm not a stupid person. (You should see all my books!) I am well aware that the word "feather" carries the same corporeal weight as the word "anvil."


However, this very silliness gave me the more practical notion of arranging my books, my thriving community of authors, by how each might complement the other. To allay my fear of an avalanche I reinforced the brackets with larger screws and then tackled the books.


I put Dave Barry next to Franz Kafka: Dave to extract an occasional chuckle out of the gloomy Franz, and Franz to maybe drag the frolicking Dave out of puberty. I ran into trouble with the vitriolic Dorothy Parker and put her aside until I could find a few thick-skinned authors, but when I found G. B. Shaw and Voltaire I felt I had brought together a pretty good threesome.


Would Emily Dickinson want any company? I tried placing her-- albeit, a slim volume-- next to the gregarious Whitman who was standing erect on the second shelf, but to my disappointment Emily tilted away from Walt and dropped to the shelf in a dead faint.


This was not as easy as I had thought. I paced the den, weaving mindfully through the two hundred or so remaining authors who were waiting to be placed, and finished the day after spending an inordinate amount of time weighing the possibility of introducing the King James Bible to the I Ching. Sweat trickled down my forehead as I pondered the many contributors of both, and, what was worse, the anonymity of most of the authors-- a difficult placement task for even the most scholarly of theologians.



I suppose I should've foreseen the Herculean task ahead of me, but, I thought, if I'm to commit myself to this initiative, then all the books in the den should be part of the same system. I therefore removed the books from the other shelves that flanked my den and sat among them, counting. The tome-tally came to eight hundred and fifty-three-- excluding magazines, six personal notebook journals, and a dog-eared New York subway map.


It's been a few months since I started this project, and I've been spending the better part of my waking hours in the den. My wife has established a regimen of bringing my lunch, carefully setting the tray down on four towers of selected, neatly stacked books that I had erected-- selections that I know will try my organizational skills and will remain idle until I'm near completion. Oddly, she's yet to ask about my semi-seclusion. It's probably just as well since I'd be hard put to give a satisfactory answer-- her being a Dewey Decimal kind of woman.


This morning was quite productive. I found it easy to find a place for my self-help books. In one fell swoop I relegated them to the den's darkest corner. I did this with little remorse, since, among other failed attempts at perusing them for self improvement, I'm still uncomfortably overweight and have yet to cease my nail biting.


As of today, my efforts left me with a mere four hundred and twenty-four books still waiting for homes. The afternoon was a bit troublesome, though. From noon until the late day shadows crept across the last of my shelved books, I scrupulously examined two authors, but I just couldn't decide, in good conscience, if I should put Scott and Zelda together again.


Rich has taken some time off from writing and is busying himself with convincing the Library of Congress to adapt his system.

Published in Absolute Write (copyrighted)