Shelf space

I once had the privilege of presiding at the wedding of a seminary president and a professor of homiletics. I said in the homily that I wasn’t concerned about the longtime viability of their relationship, but I was worried about how they would manage to combine their personal libraries.

I’d like to claim that idea as my own, but it was inspired by Anne Fadiman’s essay “Marrying Libraries,” in her book Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.

Fadiman wrote that it was good that the Book of Common Prayer didn’t say anything in the marriage vows about marrying libraries and throwing out duplicates. “That would have been a far more solemn vow, one that probably would have caused the wedding to grind to a mortifying halt.”