"It does smell a little musty down here." I replied, peeking around a teetering stack of books.
"I've been working down here for five weeks straight, ever since the water came up, to clean up this mess." He said.
The Great Flood of 2013 had backed up city drains and filled our customer's basement with two inches of water. Normally, a basement can handle two inches of water with only minor damage to property. But not in a house filled with books. I didn't doubt him when he said he'd been working for five weeks.
I glanced around the well-lit basement in the customer's home, searching for the furnace room. Books, piled everywhere, kept me from identifying where one room began and another ended. A single well-worn path in the carpet wove between veritable mountains of knowledge and learning. Hundreds of books. Thousands, maybe. Given no choice, I followed the path. It curved right over to the utility room, so I poked my head in. My coworker, Stan, was working on the furnace, checking the filter. He was having difficulty pulling the filter out due to the lack of space. Once he had seen that the filter was good, he began to head back toward the surface. But the thin path did not allow for passing, so I backed out of the furnace room, all the way to the stairwell. Then, remembering that each side of the stairs were stacked with books, I ducked behind a door so Stan could exit.
"I lost a book worth $1,000." The Homeowner sighed.
I imagine he finds value in every book he finds. Why else collect them?
"It was damaged beyond repair." He continued. "Completely soaked."
"Do you sell books?" I asked.
"Oh yes. Yes, I sell books." He replied.
"How do you sell them? Book shows?" I queried. I wasn't entirely sure if a man in his 60's would use the internet for selling books.
"Oh, here and there. I sell them online, mostly. Right now I have 2,400 books for sale online. Occasionally I take some books to Crowded Closet and other places."
"Twenty-four hundred books!" I exclaimed. "So would that mean you have around 4,000?" I tossed out a conservative estimate as I glanced at the stacks and stacks of books.
The Homeowner smiled.
"I suspect I have a little over 40,000 books."
"Forty thousand!" I gasped.
"Oh yes. I've been collecting them since I was in my 20's. Now my boys are selling them, and they're in their 30's."
I did the math. Even if he sold every book in his place for $0.50, he'd have 80,000 quarters rolling around in his piggy bank. $20,000.
The Homeowner's sons were there, sweating and generally unhappy with their labors, which included transporting tremendous quantities of books from one location to another. But they silently kept at it.
I ran outside to see if Stan needed anything with the air conditioner. After all, that was the reason we had stopped by. The Homeowner mentioned that the air conditioner wasn't operating properly. We quickly found the source of the problem: the 220-volt wiring to the outside condenser had arced and burned a wire. The electrical disconnect box would need to be replaced. But first, I would have to locate the fuse panel and shut the electricity off to the box. I ran back downstairs, keeping careful check of my elbows lest they swing out and initiate a deadly cave-in.
I explained the situation to the Homeowner, and told him I was searching for his fuse panel. He smiled apologetically and pointed to a far corner of the basement.
"There's a path to the panel behind the computer desk, if you can squeeze back there." He said, indicating a miniscule break in the towers of books, looming over a simple computer desk. The desk had a dusty computer monitor on it, running what appeared to be Windows 97. I squeezed behind the desk and arrived at the fuse panel. I located the proper breaker and switched it off. Squeezed my way back to the main floor path, glancing at book titles on my way out.
Whale Talk. A Box of Bees. Event 1000. Queen Sends for Mrs. Chadwick. Sudden Mischief. I'll Take Texas. Tuesdays with Morrie. Fire in Beulah. If I Die in a Combat Zone. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. "C" is for Corpse. The Last Catholic in America. The Intelligent Investor. The Wapshot Chronicle. Roosevelt in the Badlands. The Imagination of Disaster. Elsie's Holidays at Roseland.
I saw two copies of The Cat and the Curmudgeon stacked on top of each other. Both hardcovers. I noticed other books, nestled beside their duplicates.
"What determines a valuable book?" I asked the homeowner.
He chuckled.
"Quite a lot of things. Date of publication is one. With popular books, it should be a copy of the first printing run. Or a book of historical or sentimental value. The value of a book raises if it's signed by the author. The value is very dependent on the condition of the book. If the book came with a cover sleeve, it should probably have its cover sleeve."
In the background I heard the soft hum of dehumidifiers, working hard to remove a book's worst nightmare: humidity. With the air conditioner arcing and burning wires and generally misbehaving, the homeowner had to turn to small dehumidifiers to help keep his books dry.
I glanced at a nearby mound of books and noted that there was half a dozen books by the same author, piled on top of each other.
"Do you have these books categorized?"
"Oh my no!" He smiled. "I don't have enough room. I have a small amount categorized, but I would need much more space to do them any sort of justice."
The homeowner's garage door was open. Floor-to-ceiling shelves were crammed with every conceivable topic known to man, bound in book form. There was a minivan parked in the driveway, also full of books. I glanced down the hallway on the main floor, only to be greeted by the sight and smell of thousands of books, filling every available spot. What I saw in that single glance would have caused any competent librarian to succumb to cardiac arrest.
We repaired the air conditioner and said our goodbyes. The Homeowner was grateful for our service and made some vague comments that suggested he was slightly apologetic for the state of his basement.
We've worked for this customer for years, but this is the first time I've set foot inside the house. Dad tells me it didn't always look like that. It's grown worse and worse every year. There was a wife at one point, and she insisted that there were to be absolutely no books on the main floor. But over the years they piled up and overtook the main floor by force. I saw no sign of a wife.
I'm dreading the day we have to replace the furnace, because I suspect we'll have to tear it into pieces no larger than a basketball to get it out.
As we drove away from the house, I felt a strong urge to write a biography about the Homeowner. I imagined making multiple trips to chat with him, asking him all sorts of questions about his love for collecting books. Does he have any favorites? Any obsession for a particular genre? Although he seemed tired from the labor and bothered by the wet books, his general countenance was a man entirely content with his surroundings: thousands and thousands of books. I'd write a sensational story and enthrall literally dozens of readers with a book of my own, titled "The Man with All the Books."
But after 2 minutes and 30 seconds, I realized that writing a book for a man who hoards books is probably unwise. The Homeowner would probably take a copy of his own biography and just add it to a stack somewhere. He'd have 40,001+ books then.
So instead I wrote this blog. He's welcome to read it here, provided Blogger works on Windows 97.
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