With great satisfaction, I completed assembly today of my Ikea bookcases. After reorganizing the furniture in my apartment, I lined them up against the wall in the nook of my long front hallway, previously underutilized and really not useful for much other than shelves. The three of them together measure approximately 6.6 feet tall and long by 11 inches deep, a cozy space.
I think bookcases are an important step in my development as a New Yorker because in general they count as nonessential furniture and indicate that one means to stick around the city for awhile. The shelves are mostly barren now although I’ve moved my collection of roughly 125 DVDs to a pair-and-a-half of the shelves to make it look fuller, like those professional seat fillers at the Oscars. Eventually of course I want to stock the shelves with books, but the remainder of my collection currently resides in milk crates stacked in an upstairs closet of my parents’ house in Ohio. I’ll eventually get around to moving them, moreso now that I have a home for them.
Until I read a recent New Yorker profile of clothing designer Karl Lagerfeld tonight, I thought I had a fairly decent-sized collection, somewhere in the low-hundreds and just enough to be cumbersome and curse-worthy in a move. But get a load of Karl’s collection:
Some years ago, he bought a mansion in Biarritz, where, he says, he spent millions of dollars refurbishing it, staffed it with servants, and stocked it with a hundred and fifty thousand of his books. In 2006, after realizing that he had not visited the place in two years, he sold it.
Good lord. I think that’s more volumes than most libraries own. And unlike my lowly particle-board shelving, Karl probably had, like, solid leather bookcases emblazoned with diamond-encrusted Chanel logos.