Edition: U.S. / Global


Published: July 6, 1997


He was looking for the rare book room, but he took the wrong door, which led to the wrong elevator, which opened directly onto Mr. O'Neal's front hall. There the man was, methodically making his way along a hallway bookshelf sagging under the complete works of Djuna Barnes when Mr. O'Neal's wife, Shelley Shier, looked up.

''Excuse me, can I help you?'' she called.

''Oh, no,'' the man answered cheerily. ''Just browsing.''

New York City is full of people like Mr. O'Neal -- lifelong bibliophiles with a proclivity for accumulation, holed up in compact spaces in the intimate company of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books.

The phenomenon is not unique to New York, but it is abetted by a few facts of life here: Books are ubiquitous and often affordable; space is tight, and rent laws, just renewed, encourage people to stay put.

It does not take long to fill up a rent-stabilized, one-bedroom apartment, if a person is buying, say, a book a day -- off remainder tables, in flea markets, in used bookstores, from catalogues, off sidewalk tables, from one of those megabookstores gobbling up the city.

Suddenly, there are books under the litter box, books under the bed, books rising in towers. Moving might force a collector to winnow. But the rent is manageable, and real estate is expensive. So, why move?

Books are, furthermore, essential to many a New Yorker's self-image. The appeal is sartorial as well as cerebral. In certain circles, there seems to be an assumption that intellectual tonnage correlates with linear footage of books.

Just as empty nesters in Los Angeles convert their children's bedrooms into closets, New Yorkers commandeer bedrooms for books, even before their children move out.

So what if no one can read all 10,000? ''The point is, you're always going to read,'' said Peter F. Skinner, who has about 6,000 books in his tiny Greenwich Village tenement, the sort of place that might be inhabited by a literate hedgehog in a British children's book.

''As Anthony Burgess said, there's no better reason for not reading a book than owning it,'' said Mr. Skinner, who recently moved 2,250 more books to a $90-a-month storage locker he had furnished with bookcases on casters. ''It's always there to read.''

There is an airline claims manager with 4,500 cookbooks in her Murray Hill apartment, an architect with 10,000 architecture books, an obstetrician-gynecologist whose Brooklyn apartment is overrun with books about Napoleon.

There is Edward Robb Ellis, an 87-year-old writer, who shares his four-room apartment in Chelsea with what he estimates to be 10,000 books, including, he reveals proudly, five sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Ron Kolm, a writer and bookstore night manager, lost his bedroom in Long Island City, Queens, to his archive of downtown writing. For years, he and his wife have slept in the living room on a fold-out bed.

He recalled watching his reading material rise to a height of seven feet. ''I felt like Schliemann, only in reverse,'' Mr. Kolm said, referring to the 19th-century German archeologist. ''Instead of excavating the levels of Troy, I was creating them.''

Then there are the serious cases.

Landlords have been known to fire off letters warning tenants to divest themselves of books or face eviction. Mr. Kolm swears he knew a man who took to spending nights on the fire escape, peering in at his books.

''I've been in places where there were books in the bathtub,'' said Henry Holman, who rummages through apartments as the buyer for Gryphon Bookshop on the Upper West Side. ''I've been in apartments where there were books in the bed. I've been in apartments where you were hard put to imagine exactly where they did sleep.''

Those cases are ''getting into the realm of, at least by my definition, a kind of pathology,'' continued Mr. Holman, who lives with thousands of books, and his wife, in a one-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights. ''You might imagine some kind of underground animal bringing in things and making a nest.'' Some people keep their books sprawled in heaps. Others pack their books meticulously in built-in shelves -- horizontal, vertical, and in double rows in what one called a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

Books are insulation -- psychic, emotional, physical. For those who believe books are superior to humans, they are also hard to unload. They are a link to the past, an escape from the present, a reminder of how much remains to be known. They make statements, intended or not.

''I can't see you to the door, really,'' explained Ann Douglas, a Columbia professor with 8,000 books in her one-bedroom apartment, maneuvering past a bookcase half-obstructing the front door. ''You know, in some sense, it could seem they were more important than you. And you know, in some sense, they are.''