Books furnish and insulate Martha’s yurt. Spilling out from its opening are yet more volumes. The marbled floor swamped in a delta of typeset ink. A shifting mosaic of colour and form.
Martha is often alone with her books. They are piled high and pell-mell; triple banked against the yurt lining. Many serve as a back rest, shaped by her curving spine.
Well might Martha worship the linear regularity of a printed page, but there is nothing orderly about her collection of books. You cannot really call it a library. The tottering stacks of hardbacks and paperbacks are potentially dangerous; paper avalanches in the making. i fear for her safety, worried she might die like David Jones, the writer and painter who succumbed to injuries caused by falling shelves crammed full of books. Death by bookfall. i suppose there are worse ways of dying. Slow self-entombification for example.
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