I Murdered My Library (Kindle Single) Read Online Free

was advised. They cannot
imagine the room without them. Buyers want bland neutral décor so they can
impose their own taste on it. Or, if your taste coincides with theirs, they
want to buy into your sofa and your rug. House buyers want houses to look like
an interiors magazine. They are frankly hostile to the history of your whole
intellectual life arranged in thousands of volumes.
    In
North America, there is a service available to home-sellers which has started
to arrive in Britain, though no-one I know has used it: staging. From one
staging website:
    We
may suggest new accessories, lighting or furniture. From a stylish table
dressing to a feature mirror, some silk cushions or a throw – we think of every
detail. Transforming your property – maximising your profit. So if you're
looking to sell your home, but need a little help in presenting it for sale,
our dress to sell service is the simplest way to sell your property fast – and
for the best price.
    I’ve
looked through the staged interiors and none of them contain any books. In the
past, books that weren’t real books, glued-together leather spines, were
introduced into houses by interior decorators to add a touch of class. Now
tables are set as if for the imminent arrival of dinner-party guests. But there
is no evidence of any reading going on.
    In order
to market my flat, the books had to be pruned back. At the very least, they
would not be permitted to exceed the number of shelves available to house them.
    So
the murder began.
    ***
    First
I disposed of the multiple copies of my own books. Charity shops are not
interested in taking 30 copies of the same book, so I put myself about on Twitter,
and offered them to reading groups for the cost of postage and packing. There
was a very good take-up, and for two or three weeks I spent most days trundling
to the Post Office with an old-lady shopping trolley, packed with a box of 12 hardbacks
ready for dispatch to Glasgow or Nottingham or Cardiff. I made no demands of
the recipients; if they hated the book, they hated it, but I didn’t want to be
told. A cheque would arrive a few days later, and so the cupboards under the
eaves slowly emptied.
    The
foreign editions found homes in the public library system where they were
accepted gratefully. Polish speakers in the London Borough of Haringey now have
a choice of books: by me, or by me.
    Still,
stray copies of my own books turned up everywhere, concealing themselves behind
the now-softening Swiss ball or hiding behind a second-best printer. I threw
one box in the recycling bin. I’m going to hell, a hell in which eternity is a
Kindle with a dead battery.
    The
methodology with which I embarked on my cull was very high-minded. I would
preserve those books of literary merit, the books I had not yet read but wanted
to, and the books given as gifts with an inscription on the flyleaf.
    Judging
literary merit at the top of library steps is a beautiful and contemplative
activity. I see Catherine Deneuve, half-lit with the illumination from a
Parisian window on a Rive Gauche boulevard below cloudy pearly autumnal skies,
a few streets from Shakespeare & Co. She picks a book out from the shelf,
examines the spine. Ah, Matthieu! The much-older lover, a grizzled
intellectual with whom she spent a summer in Cadaques when she was 20. Fade and
dissolve to Charlotte Gainsbourg in 1967, in the kitchen cutting tomatoes,
while out on the terrace Daniel Auteuil is typing his masterpiece, which will
win the Prix Goncourt and later be filmed by Truffaut.
    I
sneezed. The shelves were filthy. I wobbled, looked down, got vertigo. How do
we assess André Gide’s reputation? By ‘we’ I don’t mean the French Academy.
Does anyone still read him? If no-one still reads him, what does that tell me
about literary merit? I went down the steps to the computer and looked him up.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Vatican placed his complete
oeuvre on the Index of Forbidden Books, alongside