Bibliomaniac Mansion

Read this.

It's entertaining, but I guess you don't have to read the whole thing. The point is: weird, huh?

I'm totally fascinated and totally grossed out at the same time. I really want to strap on my E.T.-style biohazard suit and walk around in there. It reminds me of an unsanitary version of this bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana called Caveat Emptor. (I used that link because the store's website is down.) The stuff there was roughly organized by subject and then kinda by author, y'know, if you squint... that is if you don't count the piles of unsorted things in the aisles (haha, piles in the aisles) and boxes of miscellanea peppered throughout.

I would go to Caveat Emptor all the time and meander about. The experience appealed me in the typical "vast tomes of knowledge that been read by others and ended up here; who knows what stories are attached to these stories" way, but part of my experience there went beyond that. It wasn't until one afternoon when I was sitting in the science fiction section idly browsing while rearranging an unordered shelf when I realized what that extra thing was. Caveat Emptor and similarly cluttered used bookstores appeal to my sense of order. Or more precisely, my sense of ordering.

Ok, think about it. Browsing at Barnes and Noble or a library or my bookshelf at home has less excitement behind it because everything's right where it belongs. But crazy-ass used bookstores are like this chaotic system that by its nature wants to come to rest. (I don't know anything about chaos theory, so don't get all uppity because that's not what I'm referring to.)

My infinitely creative mind has thought up an analogy: It's like Tetris! Ok listen, so Tetris is super boring if you keep everything at the bottom and fill up one line at a time, right? Totally unsatisfying. The whole fun of Tetris is in building up these huge towers with one column open and then giving the whole structure a video smackdown when you finally get a couple straight pieces. Then, any mess you made can be systematically cleaned up before starting again. Without the mess, it's no fun. Order from chaos.

Sitting in a clean house feels really satisfying only when you remember how dirty it was before. It's all the same principle.

I would love to take a year and tear apart the "World's Most Dangerous Bookstore" (after decontamination and without the World's Most Dangerous Tangental Storyteller following me everywhere, of course) only to put it back together in my own special order complete with a detailed database of the contents. Hell, with a nice pair of barbeque tongs, I'd even sort through the girly magazines.

Ever since Caveat Emptor, I've had this private little dream of owning a used bookstore, but the business and customer service aspects of the whole experience are enough to help me dismiss the notion right away. Instead, I turned to my own book collection. I'm out of shelf space in my tiny apartment, but there are about 525 books that I turned into 525 cataloged and organized books in very little time indeed.... mostly because I took a couple weekends off from my social life to do it.

So I guess the moral of the story is that I'm a cataloger at heart and that there's a yucky, fat man in Oklahoma City with his presumably unwashed long hair in a messy braid who is standing in the way of my dreams.