booking

Sheila had a link today to an article about people's bookshelves. Or, more specifically, about snooping in others' shelves and what might be found there.

And here, I openly admit my snobbery: I am very suspicious of a person who owns few or no books. I grew up in a bookish family. We had to rent a separate, small, moving van JUST to move the extra books when we moved house. (But no thought was given - at least no SERIOUS thought - to discarding the books).

When I moved to my current home, I had 36 boxes full of books. I have lived here 5 years now and I've probably acquired at least 10 more boxes.

I love books. They are the first thing I notice in a room (or in a picture of a room, as I commented on Sheila's blog). I love old books, new books, any kind of books.

I have a lot of older books because I was a grad student for years upon years, which meant I was well-nigh broke all of the time, which meant I generally frequented used book stores. (There was one just a short walk from my office when I was in grad school. When I was fed up, tired out, and close to throwing my computer against the wall while writing on my thesis, I'd pick myself up and go down to the book store for some sweet sweet bibliotherapy. I always felt better afterwards.)

It was there I discovered Heritage Press. This was a company - kind of like Folio Press but without the "veddy British" attitude - that published fine books. They'd get a classic book, find an appropriate illustrator, choose a good paper, choose a typeface, a binding method...whoever ran that company must have been incredibly anal and he was probably a right prick to work for, but the books are so wonderful I'm willing to forgive him for his anal qualities.

Most of the books came slipcovered; they originally came with a little flyer that talked about the illustrator, and the company that made the paper, and what the typeface was, and all.

And this is a mark of how big a book fetishist I am, but I LOVE those little flyers. I will pay more for a Heritage Press book if I know it has its flyer intact. There's just something so wonderful about thinking that the book even hs a special PAPER that it's printed on, different from the run-of-the-mill (literally!) papers that most books were printed on. And the fact that the books were illustrated - I love illustrated books and I think it's a shame that most "grown up" books don't have them. (Yeah, I know: they're expensive and they take up space in the binding. But I still love them).

So I have a whole bunch of those. Some from my beloved used-book store (which, I recently learned, is closing: apparently the whole block of shops where it used to be has been bought out by some "civic minded" idiot with no interest in history; he's going to tear down the neat old buildings and put up a damn "upscale" restaurant or something. In a college town. Well, I suppose he'll be able to exploit hire college labor, but I'm willing to bet none of the students OR faculty will be able to afford to eat at the place). Some of the Heritage Press books I own were bought from Alibris or Abe Books or Powell's. A few I've picked up at other used-book stores over the years.

It makes me happy to see them on the shelf. Even though I've not really read them that actively. Oh, I'll pull one of the tomes of poetry or the book of Poe short stories off the shelf now and then and read a bit, but I've never even attempted Don Quixote or Zuleikia Dobson or War and Peace or any of those. Will I? I don't know. At the rate my life goes now, I can barely push my way through the book-club book-of-the -month.

But - I have a good memory. Most of the books I own, I can actually remember where I got them and when (the used ones, at least: new books seem more anonymous). I remember the shelf of South Sea books got started on a trip to Hawaii when I found that the Waldenbooks in the mall near where I was staying had a whole raft of University of Hawaii press books. And then, I found more, oddly enough, in a used-book shop when I was on a trip to Madison, Wisconsin. And the copy of Lucia di Lammermoor was bought one rainy fall day when the computer had seized up on me and I deserted my lab for the friendlier confines of my local used book store.

Looking at them all is a catalog of my travels. Even down to the weird mid-century novels by authors I've never heard of (A.J. Cronyn? The "Oaks of Jalarna" series?) that I bought when I first lived here, was desperately homesick and missing my beloved used-book stores, so I'd buy whatever wasn't too water-damaged or roach-eaten at the local antique shops, as long as they didn't overprice it.

I have a huge range of books on my shelves. I have some classical stuff: a new translation of the Peloponessian War that I do intend to read sometime, my college-copies of Plato and Herodotus. Books on learning Latin, something I still want to do someday. I have many biographies, including the two-volume set on Washington and a gigantic one on Bach that I will probably never read. I have my South Seas books, my "classics," my 19th century "improving" novels (Another fascination of mine: the books for "wide awake" girls that are SO moral and SO hokey and yet are also strangely fun to read). I have shelves of historical essays, books on mathematics and quantum physics (another pet interest of mine). I have piles of mysteries - almost all of Rex Stout's mystery novels, mostly acquired used, in hardback, in the old Viking Press bookclub editions. I have lots of Ngaio Marsh, I think everything Josephine Tey wrote...and lots of the nice little paperbacks of the Maigret stories. (I should read more Maigret. I forget about him.)

In my bedroom - well, ignore the piles on both sides of my bed, I intend to buy another bookcase soon - I have three more bookcases. (small ones). One loaded with the "chapter books" saved from my childhood - Narnia, and some of the Oz books, and My Side of the Mountain, and the Borrowers, and Mary Poppins, and the Madeline L'Engle books - most of which I only came to as an adult, and regret what I missed when I was 10. Another shelf holds my spiritual books - ranging from pretty straight Christianity into Buddhist-Christianity mixes to more mystical stuff. And a third shelf where things that I don't have room elsewhere for go - lots of the recently-purchased novels, a couple of books on the Balkans, the Jasper Fforde series. And in my dining room: my cookbooks (a whole wall full) and my gardening books.

Books everywhere. Which is paradise to me.