What the Palisades Hearth Took, and What It Left

ayear in the past, I used to be standing within the aisles of Santa Monica’s Angel Metropolis Books & Data contemplating a well-known however newly vital query. I used to be holding a slender, charmingly illustrated quantity from 1938 referred to as Carmen: The Story of Bizet’s Opera. Ought to I purchase it or go away it behind?

I had weighed that actual yes-or-no query untold 1000’s of occasions throughout my 60-some years of e-book gathering. This time was completely different. Weeks earlier, excepting a number of unexpectedly grabbed gadgets, my total assortment of one thing like 4,000 volumes, acquired one after the other over all these a long time, had turned to smoke and ash within the Palisades Hearth. The query earlier than me was not nearly this specific e-book, however about whether or not it made sense, in my late 70s, to start gathering another time.

I’d owned so many books in so many gathering areas that nobody however me knew the extent of what I’d had, and even I’d neglect the specifics every now and then. My film-book assortment, no shock given my practically 30-year stint as a Los Angeles Instances movie critic, lined a whole wall. However I additionally had cabinets upon cabinets of hard-boiled crime fiction, together with an impeccably jacketed first version of James M. Cain’s The Postman All the time Rings Twice. I had many cabinets extra of Yiddish literature in translation, with an emphasis on Isaac Bashevis Singer, who’d personally signed a replica of his Nobel Prize speech to me.

There have been additionally a whole bunch of Grosset & Dunlap’s Photoplay editions, books concerning the historical past of Montana (my spouse’s residence state), and the various volumes I’d purchased whereas researching my joint biography of MGM titans Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. Then there have been the one-off books I’d gotten as a result of that they had spoken to me. A primary version of George Eliot’s philo-Semitic Daniel Deronda; a colourful jacketed first of Zane Gray’s Rogue River Feud, purchased to rejoice a household boat journey; a e-book on avian illnesses by Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz.” All of it gone, all of a sudden, in a single day. E-book blogs mourned my loss, a distinction that was each affirming and heartrending.

Learn: The home the place 28,000 data burned

My books had virtually outlined me, offering consolation and order in a chaotic world. Nearly a yr on, I discover myself fantasizing that my assortment nonetheless exists in one other dimension, like a e-book heaven, intact however eternally out of attain.

Maybe the fireplace had been an indication, the universe making an attempt to show me concerning the impermanence of objects and the futility of gathering. Possibly the virtuous minimalists who mocked possessions have been proper. I’d learn tales of individuals utilizing the fireplace as a chance to begin over. One couple we knew discovered of their loss an opportunity to dwell in central Paris—the place, Notre Dame however, the potential for a catastrophic fireplace was near nil.

My spouse and I have been planning to remain in West Los Angeles, which made the prospect of gathering once more really feel like rebuilding a home in a floodplain. I used to be additionally rather a lot older than my late buddy Ricky Jay had been when, at 45, he started a brand new assortment of magic-related memorabilia after he misplaced an earlier one. No matter how a lot time I had, I knew I might by no means have the ability to exchange the various one-of-a-kind gadgets I had so lovingly amassed, comparable to a beautiful Soviet first of Isaac Babel’s Crimson Cavalry in a customized clamshell case.

All of this and extra went via my head in that should-I-or-shouldn’t-I second within the Santa Monica bookstore.

The e-book in query was not significantly uncommon or noteworthy, however one thing about it appealed to me. Lastly, I listened to my feelings: I wished it, I might afford it, so I went forward and purchased it. I’d cope with these bigger questions later.

However I didn’t ponder; I didn’t reckon; I merely stored shopping for. On a long-planned journey to New Zealand a few months later, I skipped trekking and tenting and took within the nation’s exemplary used-book shops as an alternative. I discovered a Bashevis Singer e-book that had began its journey in a Singapore bookstore, or so the imprint on its elaborate plastic mud jacket claimed. I changed a few of my incinerated Anthony Trollopes with an Everyman’s Library set of his beloved Chronicles of Barsetshire—although the price of delivery these six volumes hand-crafted the frugal Wellington seller blanch.

One among my oldest buddies, an artist in Greece who collects cheap paperbacks with vivid covers, parted with “the prize” of his personal assortment—a fantastic Penguin version of Cain’s Serenade—to assist me together with mine. He wrote that he hoped that the e-book would function “a type of ‘talisman’” for me, “carrying with all of it the most effective into the longer term.” A buddy in Los Angeles returned the copy of Babel’s Benia Krik: A Movie-Novel that I had given him years earlier. Sellers I knew provided reductions, subsidies, even books totally free. In December, a field of books arrived unexpectedly from our legendary Montana landscaper and tree specialist, who’d heard about our loss and wished to “assist construct again” our library.

These touching gestures jogged my memory that books have been restorative, bringers of pleasure in addition to data. They recalled a chat I as soon as gave to e-book collectors at UCLA, wherein I invoked the Jewish idea of tikkun olam, the restoration of a shattered world. Although e-book gathering is commonly a solitary exercise, I got here to see that gathering so many voices and far-flung volumes right into a unified assortment is “a strategy to heal the world one e-book at a time.”

Presents from buddies and colleagues additionally compelled extra sensible concerns about what I truly wished for this new assortment, and the place I might put it. Among the many first items of furnishings we obtained for our new rental residence have been sizable bookcases. But they’re nonetheless modest in contrast with what I used to be used to, and I didn’t wish to fill them up too shortly. My earlier gathering targets had been encyclopedic, however this “the extra the merrier” aesthetic would now be impractical, for causes of each area and time.

Casting about for inspiration a couple of sustaining gathering path, I remembered an impulse buy made simply after coming back from New Zealand: The Miniature Library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ Home, a e-book that describes the whole lot you ever wished to know concerning the practically 600 miniature books, none taller than a number of centimeters within the famend dollhouse created within the Twenties for the spouse of King George V. This tiny library, which had gardening books, the entire works of Shakespeare, and a few 200 handwritten volumes by the likes of Thomas Hardy and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was not meant to be complete. It was meant to “mirror the literary panorama of the time.”

Although nobody is handwriting any books for me, tiny or in any other case, this dollhouse library helped me see the way to proceed. My new assortment can be spare and potent, a miniature model of my former enormity.

Learn: ‘I’ve by no means seen something like this’

I turned to stalwart web sites comparable to Bookfinder to find works that had been significantly painful to lose, together with Abraham Joshua Heschel’s magisterial The Sabbath and Alfred Kazin’s reminiscence piece A Walker within the Metropolis. I changed outdated buddies and made new ones. My miniature Montana assortment, which inserts snugly on a single shelf, mixes beloved classics comparable to The Final Finest Place anthology with newfound gems, together with Copper Camp: Lusty Story of the Richest Hill on Earth, a colourful 1943 historical past of the booming mining city of Butte.

If a shelf turns into too tight, I really feel extra snug culling now than I ever had been earlier than the fireplace. There turned out to be one thing satisfying concerning the self-discipline concerned in making a personally significant assortment inside these constraints.

The harm of loss, after all, just isn’t so simply overcome. Every time I see {a photograph} in a newspaper or journal of another person’s still-intact library, I wince and have to show the web page, and it is going to be that means for some time. However once I enter my workplace and expertise my new assortment, admiring the trimness and focus of what I’ve executed, I really feel one thing just like the calm I felt earlier than.

The fireplace didn’t launch me to turn into another person. It didn’t liberate me from my previous in order that I might strive on a brand new type of life. As a substitute, it helped me see what it’s about my life and myself that I very a lot wish to hold, whatever the circumstances. And it seems that managing to remain myself amid the chaos of the previous yr was extra of an accomplishment than I’d realized. Possibly not miraculous, however one thing of worth nonetheless.