The time had come again. The little white bookshelf in the dining room, two shelves, three feet wide, was full. Overly full. The books were stacked in columns, bottom edges rather than spines showing, each shelf crammed tight. Elsewhere in our compact flat, a few other piles of books bubbled up like springs. These are the books my wife and I have accumulated in the last year or so, and we must find new homes for them.
It’s not that we wouldn’t keep them if we could, but there is the undeniable matter of finite space. When Julie and I first moved into this two-bedroom flat twenty-six years ago, we knew immediately we would have to be judicious with the books we kept. Julie and I had both been in the book business for a long time before we married—she was a book publicist in Montreal, I had been a bookseller and publisher in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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