Moving is hard. There’s no way around it. No matter how many times I do it, no matter how far in advance I start, I always wind up stressed and buried in teetering towers of boxes. But moving as a bookworm poses its own problems.

Books awesome! But they’re also heavy and take up a lot of space. One of my shelves had books stacked two layers deep. Another was bowed under the weight. And that doesn’t even count all of the books I’ve left in weird places.

Okay, so here’s the breakdown. As far as shelves go, I have one regular standing shelf, one of those little cubby hole shelves sold at WalMart, and five wall mounted shelves from Home Depot, each one roughly six feet long. Needless to say, these hold a lot of books. But, of course, that wasn’t all the books I needed to pack.
I’m pretty sure books just spawn new books. No matter how tidy I try to keep my shelves books just seem to spill off them and onto anything and everything in the general vicinity. End tables, the bar, the floor, hell, the top of the microwave. I’ve found books pretty much everywhere you could think of.

Under normal circumstances this would be funny, but with no real consequence. But when moving, this is frustrating to say the least. Twice now I’ve thought that I was finally finished packing books only to find more in a very weird place. At fifteen boxes I started packing the glasses beneath the bar where three books (an illustrated copy of Black Beauty, a book on proper gardening techniques, and a coffee table book) were tucked between the side of the bar and a wine decanter. My husband took a couple books he wanted to read (King Lear and The Queue by Basma A., Aziz) and left them on his work bench beneath a box of EL wire. And the nightstand pile. I thought I had a very under control stack of books on my night stand. Turns out there were seven, not counting the book I found beneath the boxes of contact lenses on my dresser.

Have I found all of them? Maybe? At this point I’m not confident anymore. I have an open box beneath my desk half full of books just in case, and fully expect it to be full by the time I move.

But the worst part about moving as a bookworm?

All my books are gone! The shelves are empty, and stacked against one wall. All my books are packed into boxes where I can’t get at them. Every time I look at the wall where all my books used to be I get a little sad. And to add insult to injury, I don’t even have time to read the books I have access to. Between packing up my apartment and fixing up the house my husband and I are moving into, our days are pretty full. I think I’m suffering book withdrawal.

We haven’t actually moved yet, so it will be some time before I get my lovely book collection back. Even then, it’ll be a while before they’re all unpacked. Between my mother in law moving out of the house we’re moving into and a general spring (summer?) cleaning, there just won’t be room to unpack for a while. I’ll have my Kindle, of course, but there really isn’t anything like a physical book. Stay tuned for an account of how I’m coping, or not coping, with minimalistic book living.

What are your experiences of moving as a bookworm? Let us know in the comments below!