On remembering books

I have spent time for the last two early mornings trying to remember what books I have, with an inspection in the evening of the first day, an inspection which revealed large gaps in the record. Various thoughts about this exercise follow. Thoughts which are based upon the truth.

Some of our books came down to us from our parents, and so have been with us for a long time. Perhaps a third of the total. Maybe another third has been bought from new and another third bought second hand, that is to say from anything from indoor antiquarian book shops down to outdoor car boot sales. The books are mainly kept in two large bookcases and three smaller ones. I have read some of them, consult others and have looked at most of them. But used or not, for one reason or another, I just like to have them and I don’t like to throw them away – but that is another story. Not today’s story at all.

Today’s story started first thing yesterday, when I tried to remember as many books as I could. This continued off and on during the day, while making a point of not looking at the book cases. Then at the end of the day, I did look, to find, apart from lots of surprising omissions, great chunks of book which had not come up at all, that I had even been wrong about the number of bays in the large bookcases. I had not thought to think about the number of shelves, but if I had, I imagine I would only have had a very rough idea. Then I was surprised this morning to find that BH was much better at the bay and shelf counting business than I was, possibly because she spent quality time dusting them, a process which did a better job of locking down memories than simply looking at them.

The end of second day estimate was something more than a thousand books altogether. In this, counting one ten volume book as ten rather than one.

I found that thinking about the places, the particular bay or shelf where the books were kept was the most productive way of producing the books themselves. I can recall the appearance of some of the shelves and from that appearance I can get at some of the books. I am reminded here of the memory tricks of Matteo Ricci, reported by Jonathan Spence, which used to involve associating things he wanted to remember with things and places in rooms which he knew well. He would then go around the room in some remembered order, recovering the things to be remembered, in the right order.

I often found that remembering one book in a shelf produced a spurt of books from the same shelf, or perhaps from neighbouring shelves. But more often than location, the jump from one book to another depended on some other property. The physical appearance of the book, the occasion on which it was bought, the occasion on which it was read, the place from where it was bought, the subject matter or the author. Sometimes books popped up for no reason that was apparent at all, although if one was able to inspect unconscious processes there probably would have been a reason. Brains do not play at dice any more than God does.

One might think that bulky sets of books ought to be easy enough to recover, but while I recovered the two most bulky sets, Chambers encyclopedia and the OED, I failed to recover a lot of the other sets.

Generally speaking, books with dust jackets or unusual bindings, were easier than those without. The memory seems to like the designs on dust jackets, designs which are intended, after all, to catch the eye. The owners of those country house libraries, like the one, for example, at Polesden Lacey, where a lot of the books are bound in a uniform, if rather dull & dusty red, without a dust jacket to be seen, must have a much harder time remembering what they have got. But then, nothing much else to do out in the country.

Then a wheeze which I came to this morning, a wheeze which turned up quite a lot of books, was to go through the alphabet, trying to associate to books through each letter of the alphabet in turn. I found I could come up with either a subject or an author for most letters, and armed with either one or the other I could usually come up with some more books.

I would probably have been able to do much better if I had allowed myself to write things down as I went and introduced some order into the process (hopefully without wandering off into fascinating speculations about different ways to classify one’s books). Doing it in one’s head, it is all rather random and one soon loses track of whether one has done a book before or not. And doing it over several sessions without notes is quite hopeless. Reading and writing really do help!

But they would not have helped with two difficulties that I had. One was that I was often unsure about whether a book had been recycled or not. Two was that I was often wrong about the location of a book, tending to remember where a book had been, rather than where it was now. The brain could not, or did not, trouble to keep up with all this, just sticking with the original memory.

And while doing all this, I was tempted to start organising the books in some more coherent, some more memorable way. So that all the books on a shelf had something in common. This might have been my way to achieve what BH had achieved with dusting. And speculating, I wonder whether physicalizing the memory in this way helps in itself, thus linking into action theories of perception. Part of which is that the brain is good at storing the complex sequences of commands needed to do stuff like climbing the stairs in the dark or catching a cricket ball in the light and can maybe leverage that for other purposes.

Which brings me to my point of entry, which is that what a brain does not seem to be able to do, at least not without training, is to simply roll through and recite a complete list of books in some particular category, in the way that a computer would have no trouble with a query like ‘give me all the books in the front room which include the word concrete in the title, sorted by date of acquisition’. Or even ‘give me all the books, from left to right, from the top shelf of the left hand bay of the bookcase next to the stuffed gazelle’.

Computers use various wheezes to organise their data, but what they all seem to be good at is exhaustive recall. They can recite the names of all the books. Whereas what my brain seems to want is entry points. There are not many book cases and I can already recite them off, together with the number of bays to each book case and the number of shelves to each bay. Then, with a little more effort and rather more reorganisation, I could probably remember the organising principle of each of those shelves. That this shelf was about history, this one the works of D. H Lawrence, this one books from the latest incarnation of the Everyman’s Library. With this, I should be able to get near to all the books. A trick, I might say, I would probably find a lot harder if I had, say, twice as many books as I actually to have. Impossible at five times. But even as it is, I could not be sure that I had actually got to all the books. Near yes, but not to.

To be sure in that way, I think I would need to remember counts. That I had 13 novels by D. H. Lawrence and I could then worry away at that one until I could count them off on my fingers, possibly alphabetically. Each morning I would recite off a chunk without looking, then look and correct. Gradually I would get better and better – but it seems unlikely that I would ever be exhaustive. A certainly not a very good use of time, not at least until I am old enough to need to do exercises to keep the brain ticking over. On which basis I may have a year or two to go.

So the best brain strategy I can come up with is to have a small tree structure which I can navigate more or less at will. Where the leaves of the tree structure are the shelves, or possibly even parts of the shelves. And for any leaf of the tree I can pull up a subject – say the history of the Ukraine – and a number, say 14. On a good day I will be able to tell off the 14. To worry away at it until I can.

I can then complement this activity other days by thinking up books at random, perhaps using the alphabet trick, and then allocating them to shelf. This might also serve to pick up errors & omissions in the first process. Perhaps I should persuade some student from the local school of cognate studies to come and conduct some tests? How many books which I did not own would I lay claim to? How many books which I did own would I disown? How many books which I did own would I be able to place? Having read somewhere that, generally speaking, one thinks that one’s memory is a lot better than it actually is, I dare say that I would not do all that well at all of this. Or perhaps, more modestly, I should try committing the coverage of each of 21 volumes of my version of the OED to memory. This ought to be easy as it has to be an ascending, complete, alphabetic sequence. There is an organising principle to lean on.

All of which suggests to me that the brain is much better at linking than it is at scanning. It can get from one thing to another. It may even store like things in like locations in the brain, but it does not seem to be very good at getting at everything at any one such location. Not bad at exhausting but not good at exhaustive.

PS 1: I might add that, for the moment anyway, I think I am much better remembering about real books than I am about remembering the much smaller number of books on the Kindle. This may reflect nothing more than the fact that I do not use the Kindle that much, do not spend time looking at the catalogue pages in the way that I spend idle time vaguely looking at the bookcases.

PS 2: luvvies, at least the stage variety, have a different kind of remembering to do. Presumably the tricks of this trade are quite different, but it occurs to me that a common thread might be that it is a lot easier to remember something with redundancy than without. So a random sequence of words is hard but a sequence of words arranged into a poem is relatively easy.