Another issue of Atlantic Monthly arrives in the mail, and so grows my pile of “must read very soon” books and magazines, which never seems to get any smaller. I consider it a crime against intellectualism that I subscribe to Atlantic and not National Review, but the simple fact of the matter is that NR costs more to re-up than I can comfortably pay at any given time, something along the line of sixty dollars, so subscriptions to that fine publication tend to lapse. And if Atlantic thinks I’m going to continue this arrangement for anything more than thirty bucks a year, their subscription department is on The Crack.

Tucked neatly next to Atlantic was an invitation from The New York Times to join their incredibly shrinking readership at the super-dee-duper, mega-fantastic, booyah rate of so-and-so much a year … or six months, or whatever. This letter barely crossed my retinas before it dropped harmlessly into the recycling bin. I manage to keep up with the Left just fine without having to poison my daily life with The Times; and besides, if so inclined I could just subscribe to The Nation, which contains a percentage of the Communist loving freakfest at a fraction of the cost.

Currently reading Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, on loan from the library. You should visit your library more.

Among the many books currently sitting on the main desk in the front room awaiting my gaze: Londonistan by Melanie Phillips; Neoconservatism: Why We Need It by Douglas Murray; Why America Slept by Gerald Posner; Dylan Thomas: A New Life by Andrew Lycett; The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue by Robert Klein; Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight by Howard L. Bingham and Max Wallace…. It goes on like this. There are seven or eight others I didn’t mention, but of the group the book I feel worse about not reading if Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, which I hear is excellent, but which has been sitting here on this desk, virtually untouched, for well over a year while I concerned myself with other things.

Sometime last weekend I officially grew too large for my home. The study is too cramped and there is simply no more room for the books not only mentioned above, but for those already read and awaiting shelving. And the Lincoln research (more about this in a bit) is confined to a little corner, but will soon enough grow out of control and will have to be kept … somewhere else.

So I look around Camp TGO. Who needs two desks in their front room? One, where I’m sitting now, is where I spend the majority of my waking hours at home; the second – to my left, on the other side of a deep, comfy chair – houses a second computer setup that hardly ever calls for use, but simply cannot be kept anywhere else due to space restrictions. If I moved this second desk back to the bedroom, for example, I’d perhaps be tempted to stick a piece of exercise equipment in the empty space, which in record time would become the most expensive coat hanger in the house.

What utterly ruins the study, other than the fact it’s too small, is a third desk (this one’s an antique, and I wouldn’t part with it for your life), on which I plan to write Lincoln’s Tomb when the time is right, and my magazines. There is absolutely no good reason to keep a four-year run of Sports Illustrated that began about a decade ago, for example, but I’m always reluctant to part with any book or magazine in which I could learn, or re-learn, something in the future. And since that could be said about virtually anything I read … well, you see the problem.

These, while of some personal import, all exist to distract me from Abraham Lincoln, so I must address that book’s progress. Sometime in early August, Leonard Steinhorn (of “Leonard Steinhorn is a nitwit” fame – buy his book, The Greater Generation, here) helped me put together an introductory letter, the purpose of which will be to interest literary agents so much they’ll be hording outside Camp TGO and rushing the joint to take me on as a client. When it was presentable, Steinhorn said it sounded interesting and offered to forward it to his agent, which I found (and continue to find) extraordinarily flattering. So, off it went to said agent, and I began working on a synopsis, because agents and publishers need those, too.

Finally the other night it occurred to me I was rushing the project and needed to slow down significantly in order, in the end, to do the subject any justice. Obviously I have only a working knowledge of the publishing industry, but I know enough to know that rushing things will lead to a very poorly researched book. I called Steinhorn’s office at about 445am and left a voice mail, thanking him for his help with the letter, but said that I needed to slow down, adding as an aside that I don’t think I’m smart enough to write this book. (Which, by the way, is true.)

So that’s the update on Lincoln’s Tomb; I’ll probably be researching for another year, and hope to begin writing next September.

In the meantime, I’m getting an occasional itch to write and don’t know what to do about it.