Photos by Michele Lee Willson

It’s a cosmic law. When lovers of words, two poets in this case, fall in love and live together for a couple of decades or more, they accumulate books, lots of them. Margery Snyder co-edits (with Bob Holman) About Poetry for About.com. She’s read her own work up and down the West Coast, in the Southwest, and in London and Paris. Snyder’s books include Loving Argument; The Gods, Their Feathers; and Earthly Magic. Consider yourself blessed if you come across them. Two of her poems can be read on the About Poetry site: “If There Are Only Minds, Who Will Breathe for Us?” and “Heathrow To Russell Square.”

Whitman McGowan is a spoken word performer and the veteran of incendiary appearances in the U.S. and Europe, including an August 2007 spontaneous combustion at Scotland’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. To learn more about his books, recordings, and to read some of his poetry, visit his website. Snyder and McGowan live in San Francisco.

Approximately how many books do you currently own?

Whitman: Approaching 2,000, by my count.

Margery: I’ve never counted, so I’ll take Whitman’s word for it. This is for our combined libraries, which we finally intermingled on the shelves after living together for about 10 years, when we painted our apartment and had to take all the books off the walls to do it. We reorganized all the books when we put them back up and discovered, oddly enough, that despite our shared passions, there were only a very few duplicates in our two libraries.

What kind of shelves do you have?

Whitman: Lawyer bookcases with glass doors, metal bracketed wood-veneer wall shelving, and one hand-carved Guatemalan bookcase.

Margery: And of course the books spill over onto any horizontal surface in the flat — bedside stands, the alcoves beside the fireplace, the floor by the bed, the end tables by the couch, anywhere except the radiator covers, which would be perfectly good bookshelves if they didn’t bake the books. Cookbooks are on the kitchen counter between bookends.

Do you organize your books in any particular fashion?

Whitman: Our books are associated by genre and subject matter, in a very rough evocation of the Dewey decimal system, with some haphazard divisions dictated by different shelf lengths. The Orientalia are mostly segregated in the guest room (where we hung some Asian poster art, a Japanese button collection and two Thai batiks), along with the books on Hollywood and show business, short stories, Scottish novels and murder mysteries. Most everything else is out in the living room.

Margery: When we moved into this flat about 18 months ago, we spent days and days unpacking the huge stack of boxes of books, walking from room to room with armfuls of books, discussing what to put where. I started with the poetry in the big new bookcase in the living room, all alphabetical by poet’s name, then created separate shelves of history, biography, philosophy and religion, golf (and a few other sports), travel, science and music. Some groupings of books stayed together from the old place — my grad school literary criticism collection, my women’s studies books (fiction and essays), Whitman’s film books. Most of the fiction we didn’t get rid of (we shed about a quarter of our books before the move) went into the new Guatemalan bookcase in the guest room. But I still find myself walking from room to room sometimes, searching for a book I know we have, but can’t remember where we put it.

Do you lend your books?

Whitman: We will lend just about any book, but some we give away, to make room for new books!

Margery: I’d rather just give a book to someone if they want it, and will happily pass on most of my books. It’s too much trouble to keep track of books you’ve loaned out. But I’ve loaned my flute music to other players, and most of the time it comes back when they’ve finished working on the piece.

Do you treat your books as sacred, or do you write in them, dog-ear pages, break spines?

Whitman: We dog-ear pages of all but the most valuable books. We never write in them or break spines on purpose.

Margery: I love books as objects, but they are meant to be read and used. What’s sacred is the book’s power to transport you to another inner world, not the actual ink and paper and binding. (Although the manuscripts and folios in places like the British Museum or the Folger Shakespeare Library are sacred.) I dog-ear pages all the time and if I’m reading a thick paperback, I deliberately break the spine to make it easier to hold open with one hand. I wrote notes in the margins of many of the classic works of fiction and lit crit I read in school, but I’ve not written in the hardbound literature volumes I own. Though I treasure the handwritten notes I’ve come across in old books handed down in my family.

How do you mark your place in a book?

Whitman: Dog-ears and dust jacket, and occasionally a bookmark!

Margery: I dog-ear pages to mark my place in fiction, but in other books, like nature or travel guides or other reference books, I use Post-Its to mark pages I want to go back to.

Where do you get most of your books?

Whitman: Independent bookstores such as Books Inc.

Margery: And Cody’s and Clean Well-Lighted Place, both gone now. Only occasionally, when I want something specific I can’t find on the shelf in my local independent, will I order one from Amazon.com.

Do you have a particularly prized possession?

Whitman: Friends’ poetry books, a paperback version of The Spirit of St. Andrews by Dr. Alister MacKenzie and the signed hardcover version of the latest mystery by our upstairs neighbor Louise Ure.

Margery: My shelf of Harvard Classics, just recently given to me by my dad, who has developed a dust allergy and cleared out about half of his books. I love my old, giant broken-backed National Geographic Atlas of the World. And some of the handmade poetry chapbooks I got from the poets, odd little ephemeral things, are treasures.

Where’s your favorite place to read?

Whitman: Bed or bath.

Margery: Bed, or our new sunlit living room.

Do you ever leave home without a book?

Whitman: Not if we’ll be away overnight or if I have to go and sit around somewhere like the doctor’s office.

Margery: I don’t take books to the grocery store or the golf course, but just about everywhere else.