Staying Lost

When I moved from Australia to the UK ten years ago, one of the biggest challenges was deciding what to do with my books and music. Like many collectors, I'd accumulated far more than I could comfortably justify, yet each item had seemed important enough to acquire in the first place. Even after a fairly ruthless cull, dozens of boxes departed for my new home.

Once we arrived, we moved into a small house and virtually all my music and books went straight into storage. They were there, in limbo, far longer than I would have liked.

We moved into our current home a few years ago.  I was able to unpack my vinyl, and realised immediately that several hundred records were missing. Somewhere between Australia and the UK, a few boxes had gone missing. It was immensely frustrating, and so I started a spreadsheet of the missing titles, or at least those I could remember.

As I wrote in my last post, I've finally been able to start unpacking my book collection. Now that the cataloguing is almost complete, I can see that half a dozen titles are missing. I therefore assume that at least one box of books disappeared as well.

Insurance can’t come into play, as I didn't discover the loss when it happened. I discovered it years later. Even so, I have managed to replace a fair number of the missing records. I pick them up when I see them at a cheap price.  That is, if I still want them.

That’s the unexpected realisation. Faced with the knowledge that certain items had vanished, I found myself considering whether I actually needed them back. Some, certainly. There are some items that still matter enormously to me, but I’m no longer the completist I used to be. 

There are still parts of my collection where I want it all. Not every edition, variation and release, but one of each. I don’t need five copies of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, or the French, German and Peruvian releases of Abbey Road, but Philip K. Dick and The Beatles, amongst others, are an important interest that has been constant for many decades.  These are authors and artists I adore, so I do want all their titles and I return to them often. As a result, some titles are on a wants list and have already found their way back onto the shelves. Others have remained absent, and I no longer feel any urgency to track them down.

Some of the missing items I'd owned them for years, perhaps decades, but if I was honest with myself I hadn't listened to them, read them or even thought about them for a very long time. Their disappearance was annoying at the time. Now, not so much.

That distinction has become increasingly important. As I continue unpacking, I'm finding myself making decisions about what stays and what goes. That's not a judgement on their quality. Some excellent books have left the house recently, while others almost certainly will. It's simply an acceptance that shelf space is finite.

The younger version of me viewed a collection rather differently. Back then, ownership itself had value. There was satisfaction in complete sets, in knowing that a particular series, author or artist was fully represented. I still understand that desire, but I now recognise that I don’t need everything. I just don't feel a need to replace all that is gone.

Age? Experience? A changing philosophical viewpoint?  I don’t really know. What I do know is that the collection emerging from those boxes and enduring my cull is much smaller than the one that left Australia. The shelves are becoming more relevant, more manageable and more meaningful. The books and records that remain are the ones I genuinely want to live with.

The Sense of Wonder.

I've recently been unboxing books that have been in storage for years. There were always books on my shelves. There had to be. I could never manage without being surrounded by at least some of them. Many more, though, spent years sealed away in boxes in the garage. Now that I've finally sorted the shelving, they're gradually making their way back into the house.

I always knew what I owned. My database kept track of that for me. What I didn't have was easy access to much of the collection. As each box is opened, I check every book against the catalogue, confirm the edition, correct the occasional mistake, update the tags and replace cover images where necessary. It's wonderful to be reuniting with these old friends.

This process throws up the occasional surprise. Every now and then I find a duplicate, a book that somehow slipped through the net and never made it into the catalogue in the first place, or a forgotten signed copy. There are also those books that, despite the database, had completely slipped from my memory.

I've found myself pausing a lot to look at the cover art. I know we can't judge a book by its cover, but we do anyway. When I was younger and trawling second-hand bookshops and market stalls for science fiction novels, the cover often played a significant part in my purchasing. If the book was by a favourite or familiar author but the title was unknown to me, the decision was usually easy enough. Venturing into completely unknown names was different. Then I was relying on a combination of an intriguing blurb and a promising cover.

Looking at these old paperbacks again, I'm reminded just how much the artwork meant to me. I have vivid memories of lying on the living room floor with an Asimov novel beside me and staring at a Chris Foss cover until the image was permanently lodged in my imagination. Those vast spacecraft, impossible structures and alien landscapes promised a whole universe of exploration and discovery.

I once saw a comment that modern covers are designed, whereas older covers were art. Sure, the old covers didn't always match the story, but that almost seems irrelevant. They weren't simply trying to tell you what sort of book you were holding. They were trying to capture a mood, an idea, a sense of wonder and awe. A Chris Foss cover didn't need to be an accurate depiction of anything, it just needed to excite your imagination.

Perhaps that is why so much modern cover art doesn't appeal to me. Digital artists can create images of extraordinary complexity and detail. Yet many modern covers feel as though they have been assembled rather than painted. What they rarely do is stop me in my tracks and make me wonder. When I look at an old Foss, Pennington or Elson cover, I don't just see a book cover. I see a universe waiting. Forty years later they still make me want to pick up the book and see where it will take me.

I think the same distinction applies to the stories themselves. Modern publishing often feels highly designed. Writers have access to endless advice on structure, pacing, character arcs and plotting. Manuscripts pass through rounds of drafts, workshops, beta readers and professional editors. The results are often technically excellent, but I sometimes feel as though the life has been edited out of them. They are polished, refined and carefully constructed, yet most don't excite me the way older books do. The rough edges have gone, but so has some of the spontaneity.

Many of the older science fiction novels sitting on my shelves feel different. Not necessarily better. Often they are far less polished. The dialogue can be clunky, the characters sometimes thin and the plots occasionally held together with little more than enthusiasm. Their imagination is front and foremost.

It was more difficult to produce eighteen drafts when you were hammering away at a typewriter and producing carbon copies, and I suspect that's a big part of it. The writer reached a point where they were simply done. By modern standards that almost sounds reckless, yet some of those books still contain ideas and images that have stayed with me for more than forty years.

And so I continue to return to them. I still read contemporary science fiction and occasionally discover something wonderful, but when I think about Science Fiction, it is usually those older paperbacks that come to mind. I have found my niche. They speak to me. They still carry that sense of wonder that first drew me to the genre.

As I unpack these boxes, I'm finding books that I haven't really seen for many years.  And those covers still have exactly the same effect on me that they did when I first saw them. That sense of wonder has returned and I once again want to dive into those pages, to go and explore the universe..