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2 min read Bookish

So Long, Bookcase My Friend

I sold one of my bookcases today. I bought it years ago in Sacramento and it has been in four apartments and two cities. I also got a hit on my digital camera. Craigslist is great.

The buyer showed up with her boyfriend and as she looked at it in my bedroom, she seemed to be having second thoughts about whether she wanted it. I told her she did and dropped the price by $10 to make up for the two missing pegs. I would make a terrible salesperson. The three of us had a little bit of a conversation, and I found out she's in law school, and that her boyfriend has relatives who live in Sydney.

To help seal the deal I offered her some books that were sitting in boxes in the living room. She didn't want them at first, until her boyfriend noticed a copy of Nigger by Dick Gregory. Yeah, that's what I thought. How about you look through the rest of them? And I watched as The Slave Trade, Assata, Juneteenth, Drylongso, Go Tell It On The Mountain, and Tar Baby flew out of the boxes one after the other. (But they left the hard-cover Norton Anthology of the complete works of Shakespeare! Who does that?)

What was I doing? I knew it would be all right, but for that instant when they were being taken, I kind of had a little "holy shit" moment. I have pored through them for months in preparation for a day like this. One night, Helen and Nevin even helped, questioning my reasons for keeping them, making sure none of them were the wrong reasons (are there ever any wrong reasons?). I have already sent three boxes to Meredith, and just yesterday I sent two boxes to a friend in California to hold for me till I visit next year. I'll ship them to Australia then. It's an expensive thing to ship a 40-pound box of books.

I finally reassured myself with the knowledge that these are the books I don't want. I won't go through them again, and I won't miss them. I've got the James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Michael Chabon, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, and Henry Miller, as well as everything Lincoln, that I want. Oh yeah, then there's the Freud, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Hegel.

It's all good. I'll have the books I want with me in my new "lounge" in Australia.

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