Library Note:
The Cake Shelf
19 March 2019

¶ A while back, I reorganized the top center shelf of the breakfront bookcase in the bookroom. I had moved my collection of bulky Dover opera scores somewhere else, which left me with considerable empty space. I decided to reserve that space — an empty row at the back of the shelf — for the works of Anthony Trollope, whenever the box containing them should materialize in transport from the uptown storage unit.

This materialization occurred a few days before Ray Soleil oversaw the transport of everything else. I opened the box as soon as it arrived and came to an immediate, somewhat surprising decision. I would save the Palliser and the Barsetshire novels, plus one or two others, and dispose of the rest. (Somewhere in the bookroom, I knew, there was an tiny, ancient Oxford edition of The Way We Live Now). I also found another, better place for the twelve-odd books that I would keep. This left the space at the top of the breakfront bookcase empty. 

Then five more boxes of books materialized. A lot of them, it seemed, were books like Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, in a colorless Bobbs-Merrill edition. Am I ever going to read anything by Immanuel Kant? Even if the answer is “yes,” it’s probably not — probably — going to be the Prolegomena, which, let’s face it, I’ve held onto because of that very peculiar word, which as I recall means something in between “foundation” and “introduction,” with a big splash of “prerequisite” thrown in. You must do me the justice of believing me when I say that I have never tried to use “prolegomena” in a sentence, written or spoken. But I can’t quite bring myself to get rid of the book. That’s what the rather inaccessible empty shelf at the back of the top of the breakfront bookcase is for: having my cake (keeping the book) and eating it, too (getting it out of the way). 

I thought that it would be easy to fill the shelf, presto,with books of this kind. After all, weren’t most of the books that I had sent to the storage unit fall under the rubric of cake? Sadly, no. Quite a few of them turned out to be books that I had actually missed. (I’d even bought another copy of one of them.) The supply of readily available cake titles ran out just the far side of the halfway mark. Ray had carefully removed the books from the first and second rows of the shelf (music and movies), and it seemed an awful shame to wall up the back when it was still half-empty. But Ray, dear friend though he be, was quite rightly working on a clock, from which a bill would be calculated. Realizing that it would take some time to choose a balance of books for immurement on the cake shelf, I asked Ray to put the books in the first and second rows back where they belonged. 

There are still plenty of books to put away. More than half of them are works of fiction, bound for a bookcase that is already quite full. The other books will languish on the book cart, until I cull enough cake to make re-opening the cake shelf worthwhile.

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