THE NINETY-FOURTH PAGE

Creative stacking is the next resort for the collector. This is not the Celebrity Living magazine’s decorator’s art of stacking books geometrically correctly on low tables, arranged by length and width, color, and bulk. The true book collector doesn’t have room for low tables because they get in the way of floor space. Tables and chairs are the first to go in the well-managed collection. There must be room on the floors nearest the walls alphabetically stacked works at the foot of appropriate shelving.

D, K-L, M-N-O, and R-S-T make terrible floor traffic problems after they have outgrown the walls. It probably has to do with the healthy output of DeVries and Dickens, King and Kotzwinkle, Lawrence and Lurie, all the Mc, Macs and Nabokov, and Rice and all those Smiths.

An important question concerns the book family. Should an author’s oeuvre be broken down as the shelves spill over? Should the single first novel and the works of those of modest output be confined to the floor so the Pallisers and Barsetshires can be kept together?

God bless you, Harper Lee and J.D. Salinger who thus far have given us a perfect single novel and a mere handful of very short fiction, respectively.

And god bless you, too, Samuel Becket, whose body of work fits a seventeen-inch length of shelving.