MUSIC OF THE SPINES.(collection of books intended never to be read)(Brief Article)

A departing dinner guest at the Gardner Botsfords' apartment on Gramercy Park can find himself at a sudden loss for words, right in the middle of the thanks and farewells. The process is always the same. Somewhere between the promise to meet again soon and a parting hug, the visitor's gaze falls on a narrow, six-shelf wooden bookcase, there beside the elevator, where, willy-nilly, wandering attention picks up the book titles "Beginning Polo," "Music in Geriatric Care," and "Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva," all on the same row. What? Just down the line comes "Pray Your Weight Away" and "Selected Lithuanian Short Stories." The elevator arrives and the thanks are distractedly resumed, but a helpless backward glance discovers "Toilet Training in Less Than a Day," on the shelf below, not far from "Modern Volleyball" and "The Sexual Christian." The door clanks shut, and up (in the little round window) go the host and hostess, who are smiling. They understand.

The Botsford apartment occupies the upper floors of a handsome brownstone, which means that the elevator hall and the bookcase are part of the place, too. And what better spot to stash "Gardner's Library," as old friends think of it--a unique selection of volumes never to be taken down and opened, never to be discussed, reviewed, collated, or arranged? You can't tell a book by its cover, but in this case you can. Their owner and curator, the narrow and amiable Botsford, who is eighty-four, was once an editor at this magazine, with an office just inside the anteroom where inbound, not-yet-published books, destined to be sent along to reviewers or cast aside, accrued in teetery stacks. Running his eye week by week down the nonfiction titles, he became impressed by a sweep of unexpected subject matter and the acute seriousness of certain obscure authors--which, when combined, promised extremely low sales. He began to pluck out some of the unlikeliest volumes--"The Law and Your Dog," "Septic Tank Practices," "Successful Fund Raising Sermons"--and stashed them in a bookcase in his office, where, slowly gaining company during the sixties and seventies, they became a solace for him and his colleagues. When he retired, in 1982, writers and editors and artists found themselves mourning "The Handbook of Wrestling Drills," "Creative Insomnia," "What Can I Do with My Juicer?," and the rest, but not to worry: Gardner's ...