Behind the Ironic Column

I don’t even like The Princess Casamassima that much – so why do I have this paperback copy of it – hanging around for years and years but never being re-read.  It’s a nice, chunky paperback – Henry James tended to write fairly long novels – so it takes some space but not a huge amount.  And it’s been taking space on my shelves for more years than I care to admit.  I can visualize it in different rooms, on different bookshelves, always that compact plum-colored paperback that reminds me of Henry James.  I much prefer some of James’s other works –  but I don’t have copies of them.  I’m sure I bought this one for a literature class – but I’ve never gone back to reread it.  I have used it to remember how to spell Casamassima, which turns up in strange crossword puzzles from time to time, because I tend to get the number of s’s confused.  With the advent of Google, I don’t even need it for that.  They’ll cheerfully suggest the correct spelling from whatever I type in. 

This little book has been in my life longer than several relationships, longer than a dozen apartments and houses in various states.  In truth, it hasn’t been in my current apartment because it’s been in a box for the last few years.  Maybe that’s what makes it possible for me to part with it now – even though I’ve steadfastly moved it across country and up and down the eastern seaboard.  I never before considered giving it away – although I did lend it to several people who didn’t want to buy a copy.  The space on the shelf stayed open and it went back into its niche when it returned home — to the “literature” section as opposed to the fiction section.  Before I moved to my current apartment, my books were always arranged in sections based on my own classification system.  When I moved here,  about 18 months ago, I was in the middle of a major project at work and never properly arranged the books.  It was an unplanned move  which, combined with the abnormal amount of time I was spending at the office,  caused me to just plop books on shelves without really sorting.  The bookshelves didn’t fit in the places I wanted them, so there was some considerable renegotiation to be done with what books could fit where.  The cookbooks that had been in their own shelf for the last several years now had no designated home.  And the novels were all mixed up with the poetry.  Getting them out of the moving boxes was a good-enough goal and I figured I’d get around to re-arranging them.  I should have known I wouldn’t really get back to it.  But maybe that move was just the first sign of this new (to me) concept that I don’t need to keep every book I’ve ever had.  Not that I’m planning to get rid of the volume of Mark Twain that my mother read to me until she forced me to learn to read myself.  Or of many other volumes that have some personal or sentimental attachment.  But Henry James – do I need these novels for anything now?  If I want them, couldn’t I find them at a library or even online.  I think I could.  And, though I don’t really want to admit it, I doubt that I’ll even want them.  So The Princess  is on her way to the book donation stack – my local university takes excess books for its book sale and I can feel that it’s serving  a good cause.  So now I have room for a chunky paperback, preferably plum-colored.

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