The best thing about being newly single back in 2006, believe it or not, was finally having a library. It seemed that no matter how large our series of outer-borough NYC apartments were, living with my ex meant the floor plan never allowed for all of my books being in one place— i.e. smothering all four walls of the spare bedroom with a rolltop desk in the corner. The Garret, the name I gave my 10 x 12 foot bachelor pad/room in a work colleague's apartment in Chelsea, gave me the first real opportunity. All I needed was a cheap divider bookcase from IKEA and some nifty exotic accessories from West Elm and voila— I had a bacelor pad/study, complete with carpeted entry hall, desk, library (er, bookcase) and futon couch/bed (the kitchen and bathroom were out on the landing, so to speak).

This worked remarkably well for a few months, which is all it took for me and my uptown girl to realize the uptown/downtown shuffle was pointless. I was was eventually spending more than half my nights on the Upper West Side, so our next task was to figure out how to shoehorn my library/study into her bedroom. The result can be seen in the picture above. The table, an unfinished pine cheapy from IKEA, is from The Garret. The bookcases on the right are hers, filled with feminist and english studies lit, and the bookcase on the left is a larger version of the Garret divider. It neatly splits the space between our bed (not shown—— good grief, we need some kind of privacy) and my study. What's great about this arrangement is that we ended up with half my library on the bed side of the divider, all the stuff most suitable for bedtime reading, like poetry, short story collections, inspirational lit (of course this includes all the naughty books).

On the study side, the cubbies allow me to (more or less) neatly compartmentalize: Beat Lit in one, graphic design and comics in another, ancient history in another. You can just barely make out Fiasco on the lower right, in my toxic Bush Lit section. Above that are my current reading pile, stacked horizontally : Rumi, Ondaatje, Tosches, Cormac McCarthy. ("Current" merely denotes what my ADD mind bounces around between without ever truly finishing). An eclectic set, yes, high and low brow jockeying for space. Sometimes I just like to run hand and eye along the spines: Kerouac, Fitzgerald, Pessoa, Melville, Stevenson, Cervantes, Eco, Blake, Friedman, Gladwell, Obama, Satrapi, Rimbaud, Proust, Chip Kidd, Emily Dickinson, Darwin, Spengel, Superman, Batman, the Fantastic Four, flying saucers, Suze Orman, Jules Verne, Murakami, movie palaces, Black Mountain College, MIT Media Lab, Hypatia of Alexandria, Aleister Crowley, Marshall McCluhan. It's like the cover of Sgt. Pepper, only quieter.

In the still of the night I think I can hear my bookshelves humming with thoughts and ideas, the little black words pressed tightly between the covers, vibrating like excited electrons. 

 Ah. my bowl of loose change, a small wooden moose and a picture cube featuring my dear departed cats (you can just about make out Gypsy), in front of some of my spookier books: Harold Bloom's Omens of Millenium, The Book of Mormon, Scholem's Origins of the Kabbalah, Dante, a bio of Hypatia (the brilliant Greek woman mathematician who was torn to pieces by Christian monks in late antiquity Alexandria), more books by Scholem on the Kabbalah, three books on mythology and religion by Karen Armstrong.

Well, the geek shelf. Business cards for the branding firm I work for, two decorative boxes from India (souvenirs from a colleague's trips home),  a small pink plastic Ganesh for a car dashboard and an Apple mouse, fronting volumes by Plotinus, Herodotus, Calasso, a vintage sci-fi novel by Jack Williamson with my favorite alltime title Darker Than You Think, my as yet unwatched Extended Edition DVD box sets of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (something like 12 hours of Orcs and Hobbits and Ian McClellan), a DVD of Jackson's underrated King Kong remake, box sets of early avant-garde cinema, and uh, Star Wars.

And finally, more esoterica (Jung, Copernicus, Eliade) all diligently guarded by a mortifying girlfriend-gift bunny, a suggestive girlfriend-gift "Kansas City" shot glass, a small Star Wars TIE fighter and a stack of stocking stuffers from last Christmas I never got around to stuffing: card games and a bunch of battery-powered Rudolph Reindeer red noses we were all supposed to wear to surprise my niece. Oh well. I guess I got discombobulated since I was celebrating Chanukah with my girlfriend, soon-to-be-wife.