For 45 years now, people have been stocking up on books and book signings at the Salon du livre de Montréal. All these beautiful people are part of the readers’ hive and, like bees after foraging, then return home to stock their shelves.
Every time I see someone leaving with a lot of books, I wonder what their library looks like. Overwhelming or modest? In alphabetical order or in brothel? In any case, for me they are guardians of this strange community that likes to clutter up.
My lover and I are currently cleaning the house of my late in-laws. For 50 years, they have accumulated books in a dozen libraries. Since the walls have to be repainted, all the shelves have to be emptied. Sort out what you keep and what you let go.
Crazy work. Like a somewhat sadistic Tetris game. I look at each cover before making a choice, always juggling with this idea that “yes, but suddenly I want to read it or reread it one day…”. My in-laws also collected some wonderful art books, a true “wet dream” of coffee table book lovers. I want to keep them all. Not to mention that my father-in-law carefully kept autographed first editions or old documents like History of the Abenakis from 1605 to the present day of Abbé Maurrault, dated 1866, the first issues of the Quebec literary review Succession founded in 1934, or a frankly dubious book on the eugenics of the beginning of the XXe century. Books in which we sometimes find letters, like that of Jean Le Moyne who asks the grandmother of my boyfriend his correspondence with the poet De Saint-Denys Garneau…
At this rate, we are not out of the maze.
People who have several libraries benefit from staying in the same place for a long time, and those who, like my parents-in-law, have lived all their lives at the same address accumulate without common sense – in any case, it seems that they don’t have ever had to move, which has always been a nightmare for me, who also accumulates the books.
Why put this burden on yourself? Because my library is the encyclopedia of my soul, and one day, I would like to revisit it as one returns on a trip to a country that one does not know enough about.
If I don’t kill myself moving books by then.
Does it come from a lack, this disease of keeping the books?
You don’t need to have grown up in the shadow of libraries to be affected by them, it only takes one to become addicted, and the love for the object is increased tenfold.
This is why, at the Salon du livre, I like to donate to the Reading as a Gift project of the Quebec Literacy Foundation, which makes it possible to offer new books to thousands of children from underprivileged backgrounds: to make them switch others on the light side of the Force.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I still see it sometimes when I close my eyes at night before going to sleep. The library of my 15 years. In white melamine from IKEA. My bedroom was so small that the bookcase was almost stuck to the foot of my bed. A dozen books occupied the first shelf, everything else was empty. There was a jumble of Stephen King, Anne Hébert, Baudelaire, V. C. Andrews, Edgar Allan Poe and Snoopy. I said to myself, looking at the empty shelves: “one day, each one will be filled with all these books that I will have read”.
It was not a dream, it was a life project. Perfectly reachable since I spent my weekends at the Book Coliseum, the Book Market, the Treasure Hunter and in all the resale bookstores. I couldn’t go to bars at that age, it was in bookstores that I made my rounds, buying second-hand books which often had atrocious covers. Psychedelic drawings for Nietzsche, photos of old soap operas for Dostoyevsky…
My boyfriend and me, we can’t throw away our first super ugly books, for sentimental reasons and because we laugh every time we take them out of the library.
For decades I had distressing dreams of stumbling upon amazing books, but only had $2 in my pocket, when the bookstore was going to close forever in 10 minutes. Or I found in the street boxes filled with pleiades that I can’t pick up with my two arms alone. It was at this point.
Now that I am fulfilled well beyond the wildest hopes of my adolescence, I no longer have these dreams and I sometimes miss these bare shelves that were my best promises for the future. I will console myself at the Book Fair by giving the book away as a gift and looking at the crowd, many of whom have the same illness as me, with a smile.