ABSTRACT
M y SoHo loft became famous for a day in 1985, when itappeared at the top of the front page of the widely read New York Times’s Thursday Home section. Accompanying a feature article on “Living with Too Many Books” was a photograph of me sitting beneath towering shelves tightly filled with paperbacks. Whereas most features in the Times are forgotten a few days afterward, this has often been remembered, mostly by those likewise possessing an abundance of books, especially if they had, like myself, discovered that an urban loft could accommodate thousands of books as easily as an apartment or townhouse with many rooms. Not unlike SoHo itself, I received from the august Times more recognition for my interior decoration than for my art or writing. The article said I had 10,000 volumes, which was roughly accurate at the time, assuming that books are on average one inch thick, because the only figure authorized by me was “956 running feet” of shelving containing books. Those more experienced insist that the count must since have approached 15,000; that’s what the Italian collector Egidio Marzona told me around 1998, with the authority of someone owning, he testified, 60,000 volumes.
