After almost seven years, I will soon be wishing farewell to Birmingham and relocating to the fine city of Leeds. As a result, I’m spending my time stuffing endless piles of books (the maxim that one can never have too many books begins to look questionable when one has to move house) into cardboard boxes well in advance of the move.
The putting of books into boxes is a delicate thing because it is almost certain that the slim volume on the Black Death that you have never read will, the moment you seal it up at the bottom of one of the seven boxes marked ‘miscellaneous’, suddenly become essential reading. And do I consign Spinoza to the darkness for the next six weeks, or do I keep him on the shelf, just in case? What about that slim and foreboding book of essays by Quine? And how about my copy of The Implied Spider? One never knows when one might need an implied spider.
Such are the questions that I have been asking myself. At the same time, I have been trying to do what writing I can whilst my shelves empty. I’m now waiting to hear about the manuscript of a children’s book that I have been working on with an illustrator friend. The book is currently being looked at by a couple of publishers. I’m also still trying to get a draft of not one but two philosophy books – one popular (I hope) and one, I imagine, unpopular (or not even glamorous enough to be unpopular, but non-popular, in the way that academic books are: this one is not going to be hitting the best-sellers list any time soon); and there’s the Bulgarian novel, which is still in need of attention. So I’ll not packing my copy of Monumenta Bulgarica until the last minute, just in case.
Too many books? There’s no such thing as too many books…
Will Buckingham sent the following posts to customers who purchased Cargo Fever
