The Empty Bookshelf

by

Paul Clark

I have a secret, the sort of secret that will make a certain kind of person a little bit jealous.

I have an empty bookshelf in my living room.

For people who like reading and like being surrounded by books, shelf space is always at a premium. This isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. Book lovers don’t mind books double-shelved or stacked on the floor or on the steps or on any piece of available furniture.

When I was first living on my own in a college apartment and my book selection was small, I got by with one portable bookcase, a three-shelfer that was part of a set my parents had bought and stained when they were first married. In a period of only months, my collection outgrew this one bookcase. Since that time, I have never had enough bookshelf space. Living on my own, this wasn’t a serious problem; I was perfectly happy with stacks of books in every room of whatever small apartment I lived in.

Of course, I engaged in bookcase lust at other people’s homes all the time. I once knew a couple who ran an antiquarian book service out of their Chicago apartment. I loved going to their home, because they had bookcases in every room of their house, including the hallways and bathroom, all stuffed with books. Furniture was never a priority for me. Since I always much preferred shopping for books than furniture, I resigned myself to be perennially short of shelf space.

When I got married and our first daughter was born, shelving books became somewhat more problematic. We had larger, freestanding bookshelves now, which actually helped my daughter learn how to crawl and stand. Obviously intrigued by the colorful book covers on the bottom shelves of the bookcases, she would crawl over and systematically pull every book off the shelves, usually pulling the book jackets off, too. So we moved all the bottom shelf books to a higher shelf. This did not deter her as she then pulled herself up to the second shelf, denuding it with an accompanying gleeful cackle of toddler babble.

The first house we bought was a two-bedroom bungalow where space was at a premium. We still had the same two bookcases, but one of them was devoted to toddler books and toys. Several boxes of books packed for the move remained unpacked for the five years we lived in this house.

Our current house has a not very attractive but extremely functional built-in bookcase in the living room. Painted all white, it had 12 shelves for books and 6 glass shelves for displaying  photos, children’s art work, the occasional shell, stone or piece of driftwood collected on a family vacation, and a variety of other non-book items. It was built in front of a non-functioning fireplace, and although I have had fantasies of replacing it with a handsome, nicely stained all wood bookcase, I never have. The end result, although I could place many of my books on these shelves, especially with double shelving books—I still had boxes of books that didn’t fit.

This house also has a basement room with many shelves. Basements, for the most part, are not friendly to books, because of the damp. But since my library is more functional than valuable, I didn’t mind filling these shelves with the books that didn’t fit upstairs, just so I could say—finally, after 20 years or so—that none of my books were in boxes.

This situation didn’t last long, of course, because I still bought books, so both sets of bookshelves, upstairs and down, were soon filled to overflowing. I also had to deal with a philosophical difference with my wife concerning books. I saw them as both books and decorative items, and, thus, they looked fine overflowing from the shelves, on to the floor and other pieces of furniture and the steps. She, on the other hand, saw any book that was not on a shelf as clutter.

The compromise? Newly acquired books meant that older books had to go someplace else, usually back to a box. Over the years, my collection grew unruly even to my own admittedly lower sense of proper décor, which was one of the reasons why I purged so many books from my collection a couple of years ago.

This past winter, the longest winter in terms of snowy cold days we’ve had in Chicago for decades, we did a lot of purging of things other than books. Boxes of detritus—furniture, broken toys, abandoned appliances, unused holiday decorations, bags of out of style or no-longer-fitting clothes, high school and college papers, and even more books—went out to the alley or to thrift stores. My spring weekends will be filled with painting projects.

One of the side projects was what to do with the living room bookshelf. The upshot was that we pulled off all the pictures and knick-knacks off the glass shelves and had four wooden shelves cut and painted to match the existing shelves. Ta-da! Four new shelves for books, divvied up between my wife and me. And after rearranging everything, I discover I still have one empty shelf to fill.

Now, I’ve never had a real system for shelving; fiction was lumped with nonfiction and nothing was alphabetized. That one empty shelf has me thinking now, however. I have nine shelves at my disposal and several boxes of books in the basement. This may be the time to take EVERYTHING off the shelves and EVERYTHING out of the boxes, arrange it all on the floor of the living room, open a beer, and invent my own unique shelving system.

I just have to figure out a weekend for my wife to be out of town.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it