Books arrived daily by mail, FedEx, or by hand on the doorstep — a half-dozen was not unusual. At social functions, airports, readings, while walking to dinner along the waterfront of Provincetown, or riding the A Train to Manhattan from Brooklyn, people pressed books into his hands. Not that Norman Mailer was short of books; his library, at four different locations, amounted to more than 7,000 volumes. His last wife, Norris Church, referred to them as Kudzu, the pernicious creeping vine that covers large swaths of the American South. As fast as she gave them away, they reappeared on every flat surface in their two homes. Norman, she said, spent $1,000 a month on books, and received a large number gratis from writers in search of a recommendation.
He resisted Norris’s efforts to shed them, to the extent that those deemed worthy of further examination were retained on the dining room table in his Provincetown house for a week or two, where he would read the opening pages of more than a few. That scarred table, large enough to seat twelve, was Mailer’s cockpit, the place where he conducted all his business, save writing his books. Every morning he sat there for a couple of hours, always facing a wall to avoid the fierce morning light from the harbour coming through the large oriel window. Eating his eggs, he read the New York Times and Boston Globe, and sorted through the mail. He also did two crosswords to “comb my mind”, as he put it, before climbing to his attic study, where he would work two shifts, eleven till two, then four till eight. More books were up there, mainly reference works for whatever project was underway, plus a score of dictionaries and thesauruses, some of them nearly clawed to pieces.