Paperholics

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.