Shelve It.

I thought I had it solved but it turns out that some problems can't be solved.

I'm talking about my book problem, my book buying problem.

Back about a decade or so ago, when my New York three-bedroom could hold no more books (each room, except the kitchen) was lined with bookshelves and each shelf, floor-to-ceiling was double-stacked with volumes, I made the reluctant transition to reading e-books.

There's a convenience there that outweighs their suckiness. But not every book, can really be enjoyed digitally. The books that can't, really, are the books that are too big or too map-filled or too illustrated to even be read while sitting in your favorite chair. These are the books that I spend my non-digital-book dollars on today.

Many of them are as large as a one-year-old, and you need a table in front of you to manage them. Those books you have to buy physical copies of. This week, for instance, a used but pristine copy of Bartlett's Quotations arrived at my Connecticut doorstep. You need this as a real book, not a digital facsimile. Sure there's an indexability to having a compendium of quotations. But the real beauty of a bound edition is the serendipitous joy that comes from random perusal. Each page contains at least one present. 

The key word here is random. The random and magical joy of finding something you weren't looking for.

In any event I thought I had solved librum inundatio when my wife, L, directed the almost-complete rebuilding of our Connecticut seaside cottage. Again, each room, each corner, each cranny and each nook was lined with bookshelves. I thought I'd finally have a place for everything--and perhaps everything in its place.

But now all those places have no place for any more. 

Even in our dark age, or perhaps, Dark Age, the thinking, the writing, the art keeps coming. And I keep buying.

It's all made worse by the near instant accessibility of everything. I must get six book emails a week. From university presses (their UI almost always sucks) to small independent book-sellers that seem to know my head with their astute and curofferings and therefore seem to proffer exactly what I'm looking for that I never knew existed.

Just now I got such an email from John Sandoe books in London.

I woke up this morning, and I'm traveling today, hoping to write a blogpost but having no topic. That's when I opened up the email from John Sandoe. 98.79-percent of people in advertising could learn how to talk to people with respect from an email with writing like this, where the audience is not treated like they're imbeciles.

On Sandoe's site I saw this book. 

I've read books by Edmund De Waal before and I like him. 

More, as I re-begin my weekly work of writing this blog, and I have no ideas at the ready, nothing burning me up inside, nothing to write about, I tripped over this title.

"How to begin" is the central question creative people face pretty much every two minutes for the entirely of their lives. (How to end being the other central question. How to continue being the third of the unholy trinity.)

Of course I bought the book.

I don't have any room for it.

And maybe not having enough room for books is the greatest blessing a person can have.