From the Ashes to the Dustbin: The Making and Un-Making of a Personal Library
The floor is stacked with heaps of papers, drafts of abandoned manuscripts, works in progress, old love letters that outlived the involvement. The walls are covered with the bracketed bookshelves my brother put up when I first moved in. I myself fetched the wooden planks from a now boarded-up lumber yard on Spring Street in Soho. The shelves hold my library, amassed over the years, several hundred books, some bought, some gifted, some with singed covers and blackened edges, or coverless, damaged but still readable, retrieved from a dumpster parked outside the legendary Eighth Street Bookshop located down the block, the day after the fire. Each tome a mummy of memory, it is heartbreaking to have to separate those to keep from those to give (or, if no one wants them) throw away. But select I must.
At age 72, I am considerably less agile than I was when I first moved in in 1976. Parkinson’s disease and severe neuropathy have given my legs an uncertain gait; c hronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy has weakened the grip of my afflicted hands on an ever-wobblier banister; no longer able to tackle the steep, rickety steps to get to my garret, I decided with a heavy heart to relinquish the lease.
