Sunday, February 26, 2006

Avalanche!

Some of you may remember me posting a while back about the Leaning Tower of Paperbacks in my studio. Actually, there are four stacks of mostly paperbacks, plus a few digest magazines and trade paperbacks, piled rather precariously behind my computer chair. Well, this afternoon while I was busy creating deathless prose, a couple of the stacks suddenly shifted for no apparent reason and started raining books down on my head and keyboard. Once I got over being startled, I found this funny for some reason and had to laugh about it for a while. Livia used to use a graphic on our stationery, business cards, etc., that showed a pair of legs sticking out from under a huge pile of books. That was almost what we had this afternoon. After a couple of minutes, of course, I stopped laughing, picked up all the books, and restacked them in what I hope is a more stable fashion. And as usual while I was doing that, I noticed books that I'd forgotten I owned. I really have to get all those books read and put up.

Just one of the occupational hazards of being a book hoarder, I guess.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can sympathize. My tiny little library/study/office looks like I'm playing a game of "Jenga" (where you stack up all the little wooden blocks and then take turns pulling one out at a time and restacking unitl the whole business comes crashing down), only with paperbacks. Nice to know I'm not the only one with this problem.

Anonymous said...

Something similar has happened to me. But I was in bed and the stack on the nightstand collapsed. It is also nice to hear that someone else has stacks and stacks of books that haven't been read. For years I thought my shameful book buying addiction was unique. Not so, thank goodness.

Graham Powell said...

I recently had the same thing happen to me, but it was a stack of computer equipment, which wasn't really so much fun.

Unknown said...

Reminds me of the collapse of the bookshelves in my office a while back.