Book Math

I picked up a copy of William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2001, a shiny trade paperback find in a second-hand bookstore. The latest in a long line of Gibson books that started with my long-since read-to-death paperback of Burning Chrome that I acquired in high-school after our IT teacher showed us a documentary on cyberpunk.

I purchased Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, brand-new in 2005. At the time I was reading Murakami a lot, was just starting to write my own short fiction in earnest, and taught classes in both Murakami and short story writing to university classes.

I made a special trip into the city to buy Brandon Sanderson’s Alloy of Law from the inestimable Pulp Fiction Booksellers. I’d never read Sanderson before, but the reviews tempted me with its promise of a traditional European fantasy setting progressed to the point where it effectively contained a Wild West.

I made a similar trip to acquire Elizabeth Bear’s Blood and Iron, the first of her novels picked up after falling hard for her short fiction collection, The Chains That You Refuse, and the Jenny Casey trilogy.’

These are all stories about how the books first found their way to my shelf, where their value was clear and situational. I picked up the Gibson because it was part of a series I hadn’t yet finished, the Murakami because I was a fan of his work and was grappling with the short story form. The Sanderson’s value lay in the idea’s potential, and my interest in seeing it executed. Buying a new Elizabeth Bear book was a celebration of an author whose work excited me, and a chance to be part of an ongoing conversation about her work going on in genre circles at the tie.

That’s how they found their way to my shelf. Four books, all in trade paperback, taking up ten centimeters of shelf space in an apartment where space is at a premium. So why keep these books? Why grant them this shelf space, rather than getting rid of them and reclaiming the physical space for something else?

There are those who say you don’t get rid of books for any reason. A book, once acquired, is a thing to love forever. I went through that phase myself as a younger man, dutifully carting books from share-house to share-house, my bookshelves gradually expanding as I lived in larger places.

Part of the logic here lies in the value of a library—anyone walking into your house and seeing the metric buttload of books will automatically know you’re a reader. As statements of identity go, shelves full of physical books is a pretty big statement.

It also has a lot to do with access. In the days before online bookstores and the Dark Lord Jeff’s giant river of commerce, the idea of picking up a backlist title was a relatively weird and unlikely thing. Books came out and sat on the shelves for a month, then disappeared into the ether. Part of the reason my copy of All Tomorrow’s Parties is second-hand lies in the fact that I missed the window when it was first released and had to scour the local book exchanges for a copy.

Today, I could pick up an ebook copy for $12. I could order a smaller paperback that takes up half the space for not much more than that. Is the space that book takes up over the years worth more or less than the cash it would take to replace it, given the minimal effort required?

And so the book math changes, because the marketplace in which I bought them has been superseded. There are physical books where the math is easy—books by friends, books that are beautiful objects in and of themselves, books that I love so much that the physical copy brings me joy that an ebook never would.

And then there are books like these, which I kept out of habit. Books that interested me enough that I knew I might want to revisit them or study them for a future project, and because it’s easy to make a shelf full of trade paperbacks look nice if you have enough of them. Books whose primary value wasn’t just story, but predicated on other factors that are no longer in play.

Books who have served their purpose in my life, and may well serve a purpose again, but the math no longer supports keeping a copy just in case. If the strongest value lies in the content, not the physical container, it’s easier to reacquire a copy as the need arises.