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V4 2001 INDEX       E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 4, Number 50, December 9, 2001, Article 11 YOU CAN NEVER BE TOO RICH OR TOO THIN ... OR HAVE TOO MANY BOOKS (CAN YOU)? While looking up other things I came across an article in the Sunday, July 6, 1997 issue of The New York Times that should ring true with some of our readers: "It says something about the nesting habits of certain bookish New Yorkers that when a shopper took a wrong turn out of the Strand one day, he wandered into Hank O'Neal's apartment and mistook it for an annex of the bookstore. He was looking for the rare book room, but he took the wrong door, which led to the wrong elevator, which opened directly onto Mr. O'Neal's front hall. There the man was, methodically making his way along a hallway bookshelf sagging under the complete works of Djuna Barnes when Mr. O'Neal's wife, Shelley Shier, looked up. ''Excuse me, can I help you?'' she called. ''Oh, no,'' the man answered cheerily. ''Just browsing.'' New York City is full of people like Mr. O'Neal -- lifelong bibliophiles with a proclivity for accumulation, holed up in compact spaces in the intimate company of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books." "There is an airline claims manager with 4,500 cookbooks in her Murray Hill apartment, an architect with 10,000 architecture books, an obstetrician-gynecologist whose Brooklyn apartment is overrun with books about Napoleon. There is Edward Robb Ellis, an 87-year-old writer, who shares his four-room apartment in Chelsea with what he estimates to be 10,000 books, including, he reveals proudly, five sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Ron Kolm, a writer and bookstore night manager, lost his bedroom in Long Island City, Queens, to his archive of downtown writing. For years, he and his wife have slept in the living room on a fold-out bed." "I've been in places where there were books in the bathtub,'' said Henry Holman, who rummages through apartments as the buyer for Gryphon Bookshop on the Upper West Side. ''I've been in apartments where there were books in the bed. I've been in apartments where you were hard put to imagine exactly where they did sleep.'' "Some people keep their books sprawled in heaps. Others pack their books meticulously in built-in shelves -- horizontal, vertical, and in double rows in what one called a three- dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Books are insulation -- psychic, emotional, physical." "The congenital collectors are also awash in other things. Dr. Alvin H. Weiner, who collects books on Napoleon, also collects Napoleonic coins, Napoleonic death masks, Napoleonic autographs, Napoleon ceramics, and toy soldiers in his three- bedroom apartment in Brooklyn." "The unwritten rule is this: There is always room for one more. And if one, then why not five? Eventually, books overflow even the most expansive shelves. Then the book-besotted learns to rationalize: That pile is not in the way; I can still reach the bathroom."

Wayne Homren, Editor

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