Books

One rainy day I went shelf by shelf in my house and removed the book jackets off my books. Understand, my books. I bring memoirs, biographies, modern fiction, non-fiction, self-help, poetry, and cookbooks to our shelves. My husband brings mysteries, classics, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, theology, travel, and his academic books from graduate school. We have a lot of books.

I was thrilled with the cloth hardbacks underneath the jackets. The books were simple and beautiful in colors of black, gray, navy, white, and canary yellow. They also looked more solid because I had in fact read with the jackets on and they were tattered and torn. I tossed the jackets.  A few thoughts:

1. The book jacket is never more aesthetically pleasing than the hardback itself. Artwork, color schemes, and fonts show their dates.

2. Hardback books are stronger than they appear. Biblio.com sites the wear on the book jacket is the wear that was averted on the actual book. I disagree. Book jackets rip or crease at the spine because the spine is the point of rest while reading. Hardbacks can take it. Give them a chance.

3. If the book jacket is removed when the book is being used (a real type-A preference here) the book jacket will have to be in some other place with the risk of being used as a coaster, or getting creased under other books, or even lost.

Back to my project, my books looked great; his… not so much. And that’s precisely when I made my first mistake. I went ahead and removed his book jackets thinking I’d rather ask for forgiveness than permission. That was my second mistake. Next, I placed his book jackets in a Glad hefty cinch sack and inside an upstairs cabinet (third mistake, yet well intentioned) because I knew deep down this might be quickly nullified.

That evening, he came home and quietly digested what happened to our bookshelves. He loves me and let it be. All the while my wheels were already turning on my next, and biggest, mistake. Two weeks later, I rainbowed the shelves, meaning I arranged the books by color. First, white spines, then gray, then black, then navy, then purple and blue, then green, then yellow, orange and red, and lastly brown. It looked like a magazine. It felt orderly and clean, and it was simply pretty to behold. However, I quickly realized that book series were scattered and no longer together. A book about introvert personalities was neighbor to a Charles Dickens classic, was neighbor to the biography Amelia Earhart, was neighbor to a holocaust diary, was neighbor to Crazy Rich Asians. It wasn’t that our bookshelves were alphabetized or categorized before, but book series were definitely together, and there was some general appropriateness to their configuration. Rainbowing wasn’t going to work for us. I knew it, he knew it, and he knew that I knew that he knew I had made a mess of our books.

Twenty years together he has literally seen it all. I have ruined cakes before walking out the door for a party, almost had a baby in his Acura, locked myself out of the house with a dog and four kids, and the list goes on. Trust me, it’s a long list. Trying to undo the rainbow on multiple bookcases in our home is harder than I could have ever imagined, confirming the wise saying that undoing a mess is harder than making one. Lesson learned. I still stand by ditching the book jackets, but rainbow at your own risk. Wish me luck as I have three more bookcases to undo, a limited attention span, and a saint of a husband.