Morning all. I hope you are feeling fabulous this Friday morning. Let’s jump into the day with our final prompt of the week. Timers set for fifteen and off we go.
I expected I would be writing about a person with an overwhelming collection, but it took a turn in there. Not unhappy with the turn but surprised.
Friday, May 8th: The books were piled high.
The books were piled high. The stacks were everywhere. They rested at the corner of the sofa, were lined up in smaller stacks under the sofa and placed in piles on the sofa as well. There was a cleared spot on one of the sofa cushions that looked as though it was cleared when someone sat down and wanted to look through one of the stacks. It shifted the stacks around so they were no longer in upright piles but leaned against the back of the sofa and the wooden arm.
The bookshelves were full to bursting. Books lined up neatly in a horizontal row with smaller stacks placed on top to use the remaining shelf space. Some shelves he noticed were two shelves deep, three for the paperbacks. As Troy made his way through the room her realized that any place there could be books there were, only a narrow path threading through.
It looked like a book hoarders paradise. While he knew Jake loved books and always had many on hand, this hoarding was new and not entirely Jakes’s fault. If anything Jake was probably bothered by the mess more than anyone. He had always been obsessively neat even though he loved collecting older books.
This spate of hoarding was less an attempt to build his collection and more of a rescue mission. There were some calls for removing books from shelves. The public notices about the removal were only done for books that the government felt they could justify to the public.
While the removalists were in the libraries, they also found several other volumes they often took with them to check on their appropriateness in the collection. Thos books were never returned.
Lately there were fewer public announcements. Vans would simply pull up after hours to assist with inventory management. The person in charge would be given an authorized paper and while they called it in, boxes were filled an loaded up. Often the van was gone before the archivist or librarian managed to make it through the automated system to check on the authorization.
People, especially collectors like Jake who revered the written word, formed groups. They worked with librarians and archivists to remove books that might be deemed questionable but were too valuable to the public to lose permanently. The books, folios and manuscripts were relocated to private homes for safe keeping. The hope was to release them back into the public realm once the spate of censorship was over. Until then as many as could be kept safe were.
Jake’s family home was large and well hidden in the middle of the vast tracts of land he still owned. They started putting books and folios where they would least be noticed, extra space on bookshelves and on studies. It was how this room became so overburdened. It filled quickly. Jake opened up the dusty ballroom that occupied the upper floor of the house and if anything the stacks piled there put these to shame.
The house was filled. Thus far, no one connected Jake to the book storage and no one who knew was going to turn him in. In fact the system set up by the collectors was a blind one so that no one knew who had the books stored. Few people if any recalled Jake even owned the old estate. He rented out the land but it was rented to corporations rather than individual farmers. Those working on the farms noticed the house, saw it was in good repair with people occasionally visiting and asked no further questions.
Anyone who knew Jake connected him with his city apartment, an obsessively neat and ultra modern place, not the countryside home stuck in the eighteenth century.
Ten til Midnight 