Our books today are … all of them, every book I currently possess here in the quaint, white-painted confines of Hyde Cottage.

Over the course of 2014 in particular, I was reminded again and again of a process every bit as mysterious and insidious as the disappearance of odd socks from the dryer: the steady, unpredictable disappearance of books from my allegedly permanent collection. In 2014, I lost count of how many times I’d get some new book in the mail, be reminded by it of some older book I got in the mail and very much liked, go looking for said earlier book on my shelves in the deadfall certainty that it would be there – and then find, to my infuriated exasperation, that it wasn’t, that it was long, long gone.

“Oh, that’s easy to explain,” I hear some of you say. “You have book-reading moods and phases just like the rest of us, and you’ve got your precious Brattle Bookshop right there on speed-dial, ready at any moment to come over and whisk away the piles of books you’ve decided you don’t want.” And added to that would be the presence of several assiduous lurkers at the Brattle, ‘regulars’ who can be relied upon to snap up interesting-looking goodies as soon as they appear on the pricing table, before I even have a chance to see my discarded books on the shop’s shelves. It’s a likely explanation.

But I’m talking about non-negotiable items here! Books I simply wouldn’t ever decide to discard! Not the umpteenth slim political biography of Edmund Burke, for instance, but rather the Penguin Classic Selected Talmud, or Jonathan Steinberg’s big, great biography of Bismarck, or the Big New Yorker Book of Dogs – things that I’d be intensely grateful to get in the mail, intensely happy to read and review, and then intensely satisfied to keep on my shelves forever. Those sorts of things, it turns out, also disappear.

And the solution, I’ve determined, is to make a Grand Inventory. I’ve drafted my sturdiest three-ring binder to the task, filled it with paper, sub-divided it into pertinent sections (“Fiction,” “Classics,” “History,” “Biography,” “Nature,” “Comics,” “Sci-fi/Fantasy & Mystery,” “Poetry,” and “Miscellaneous”), and now that the New Year has begun, I shall commence doing something I haven’t done in a long, long time: I shall commence counting and listing every single book I own.

I’ll do it as methodically as I can. My strategy will be to proceed bookcase-by-bookcase, with a strict no-rearranging policy in place until it’s all completed. The hotspot of trouble, of course, will be the shelf in the living room where I store and sort forthcoming books by month; to a greater degree than I ever thought possible, that shelf now feeds the rest of my personal library, and since it’s always changing, I can hardly inventory it. I’ll save that whole area for last – I’ll concentrate instead on nether bookcases whose contents haven’t changed in months.

Or have they? *Sigh*

I’ll provide progress updates, as the calamitous Grand Inventory devolves into chaos …