Paperholics
I
am drowning in a sea of paper, the edges swim around me like sharks in
water. Sometimes the sheer numbers of
papers I live with overwhelm me – like the stack of books, notebooks, and sketchbooks
that
loiter on every flat surface and teeters precariously on the footstool beside
my bed. I am a self-confessed paperholic;
I love paper in all its forms.
During
a conversation with a fellow artist/writer, she confessed that she was a
near-hoarder in the amount of “stuff” she had accumulated and was not looking
forward to packing for a move overseas. That started me thinking about the
massive quantities of books, notebooks, journals and sketchbooks that I live
with. When I decided to count only the
books in my possession, I came to a startling realization: there are books in
every single room of my home. There are
Celtic warriors in the hallway and mostly romance in my bedroom. And although I
counted only 75 books in my room, I just know that some of those scoundrels
crept further under the bed when I went looking for them. I have to hide the
newer books around here for obvious reasons…
I
did not count the books in storage – nor did I count the five boxes of Guild
books I’m currently holding. Neither did
I count the textbooks that are tucked away in closets or wedged under
dressers. Or the myriad of sketchbooks
and half-filled notebooks, or magazines and art instruction booklets that lay
around. I did count 781 hard-back books.
(I am a book snob. If I purchase a book, it is going to be in hardback). Yet
despite that number, I know where each book is lovingly kept. I know the people that reside within each one
and have committed their stories to memory.
The
good news is that not all the books are mine: the bad news is that I may have
passed the hoarding gene on to my two boys. Jordan, my oldest, has all the
history, political science and books of wars and weaponry. Ryan, my youngest,
has most of the science fiction and fantasy books. Jordan gets his passion for history
from my father the history teacher, and Ryan, my engineering major, is a study
in contrasts. While he is well-grounded
in math and the sciences, his head is in the clouds during his down-time with
science fiction and fantasy novels.
The smell of paper is like catnip to me and many
times I have found myself giddy, standing in the middle of a stationery aisle
just taking in all that beautiful paper.
The last thing I touch at night is paper, whether it is my need to
write, doodle, or read, that compulsion has developed slowly over the
years. That is also the reason I have a
towering stack of books, and writing and drawing paraphernalia by my bedside. Artistically
speaking, nothing excites me more than the blank pages of a notebook, sketchbook,
or a blank canvas. They scream of new
beginnings and endless possibilities.
And while I have kept up with technology in other
areas of my life, I will never be
reading from a hand held device. I
understand that in the truest sense of the word, writers will write anywhere
with any media available. Writers are
more cerebral; their sole medium is words and as such, words matter more than
form or format. Artists are both visual
and textural. So as both an artist and writer
that puts me and others like me somewhere in the middle. I even kept my first
library card. It was made from orange oak tag and had a metal code bar inserted
on the front of it. Sometimes when I
close my eyes I can still smell on that library card the particular scent of
unopened books and the dust of kings that linger in the still air of libraries.
I
will use the computer and all its resources available to write, but I believe reading
should be a sensory experience. I want
to feel the book in my hands and turn the pages myself. I want to hear the sound of the pages as they
turn. Kindle? To me that’s firewood.
