Me, by the books
We are moving, again. The easiest, and the hardest things to pack are the books. Here’s this year’s tally:
3 boxes Dialogue
1 box JMH, BYU Studies
1 box Mormon women’s history
1 box cultural studies, critical theory
1 box lit crit.
1 box poetry, English
1 box poetry, German
1 box essay collections
1 box anthropology & general religious studies
1 box non-Mormon Biblical criticism/study guides
1/2 box Mormon scriptural studies
1 box original writings of prophets/bios. of prophets
2 boxes general Mormon history
1 box general history (mostly American)
3 boxes novels, English
1 box novels, German
1 box Mormon fiction and theology (no implied judgment, that’s just how it worked out, spacewise)
1 box parenting
1 box depression,psychobabble, and why-the-hell-can’t-I-keep-my-house-clean-and-organized
1/2 box devotional/sentimental claptrap
1 box Hist. of Science/science and culture/popular science writing
1 box music theory and criticism
1 box violin music and choral scores
4 boxes choir music
What about you? What’s on your shelves? Do the relative proportions of things reflect your personality and interests? I find, for instance, that grad school themes are drastically overrepresented compared to what I really do all day. On the other hand, there are also not-so-subtle hints about what it is I should be doing all day in the boxes of music. What have you discovered packing up your library (or unpacking it, like Walter Benjamin)?
Subscribe to RSS
July 30th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Whenever we move, I decide not to take some books to the next location, so I give them to Good Will. The books I choose not to keep are as revealing as the ones I do.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Theatre books — tons and tons of theatre books (inc plays, prodcution, lighting, makeup,etc). My husband works in professional theatre, so we have everything from Shakespeare to Arthur Miller to Oscar Wilde to Tom Stoppard. I on the other hand have political science books. The remainder are fiction and history books.
July 30th, 2009 at 11:47 am
The thing I learned the last time I was faced with packing and moving books was that I no longer had any desire to live day and night in a dead book mausoleum. I kept a few standard references, a few books with sentimental personal ties (emphasis on “few”), and tossed the other 6,000.
No regrets.
July 30th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
My living room bookshelves hold the prettiest books, such as by University of Chicago Great Books collection, 1930 ediiton Comprehensive History of the Church, Skousen’s commentaries on the BoM text, and so on.
My family room has most of the books I actually use, mostly Mormon scripture and history books.
I have a hutch in the pantry where I keep most of my biblical studies works.
And I have a couple of bookshelves in my den that hold my Mormon studies journals collections.
Living in a smallish house, I kind of have books all over the place.
July 30th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
I recorded what I thought was the essential core of my book collection back in 2001.
Hopefully these are all at a storage place in Puyallup.
We formerly had stacks of books in every room of our apartment, including the kitchen and bathroom. But this core always stayed on the shelf, in the order recorded. Much of our collection is going to have to be rebuilt. 2008 sucketh.
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?created&&suggest¬e_id=110909043926
~
July 30th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
When we moved into this house four years ago, I realized that I would have, for the first time in probably 25-30 years, the space to unpack all of my books. It required buying quite a few more bookshelves (several of which I had to assemble), but I have no books sitting in boxes at all. To quote Anakin Skywalker, “Yippee!” All these bookshelves are located downstairs (completely finished walk-out basement). Here’s a rough breakdown:
– 2 bookshelves: history (including Church history)
– 1 bookshelf: philosophy, politics, biography
– 1 bookshelf: classic lit, including a set of The Great Books and a set of Shakespeare (1 vol/play) and some miscellaneous books
– 1 large (6′ wide x 5′ high) bookshelf: religion (heavily but not exclusively LDS)
– 6 bookshelves: fiction (organized roughly as: one each for classics/literature, historical fiction, and contemporary thrillers; and the rest SF/fantasy/horror)
– 1 bookshelf: kids’ books (varying reading levels; all our kids are grown and gone, but we have grandkids and friends’ kids who visit)
– 1 bookshelf: science, practical (medicine, travel, finance, etc.), humor
– 1 bookshelf: human languages, math, operating systems, reference works
– 1 bookshelf: computer programming languages
– 2 large (7′ x 4′) bookshelves: various other computer science/information technology texts
I’ve also got 2 bookshelves downstairs containing back-issues of various publications (mostly ones that I wrote for back in the 80s and early 90s — The Space Gamer, Computer Gaming World, Softalk for the IBM PC, BYTE, and Macworld — but also back issues of the FARMS Review, BYU Studies, and JBMS).
There are 50 or so books in our living room, and I’ve got another 20-30 in my nightstand on my side of the bed. And there’s a small (3′ x 3′) bookshelf in my office downstairs that has books frequently referenced during my work. ..bruce..
July 30th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Note that I’ve done a lot of book pruning over the years, and did so when we first moved here to Colorado. I really don’t want to buy any more bookshelves (more for aesthetic than financial reasons), and since I’m 56, I’m trying to focus more on reading the books I have that I haven’t read yet vs. acquisition of new books. But I do acquire new books at a steady rate, for both professional and personal reasons, and I’m looking at using some half-height end-table/night-stand shelves that Sandra recently moved downstairs for overflow.
My first thought when I read that was, “No, wait!” Ah, it’s a pity (but probably for the best) that I didn’t know you when you did that pruning.
The only pruning I regret is that when we moved from San Diego to the DC area back in 1996, I left 14 boxes of SF/F books — many of which dated back to my high school and college days — with my oldest sister Deirdre. When she did a big clearing out a year or two ago, she really only had a few boxes of them left, some of which I snagged. But I know there were a lot of out-of-print novels from the 60s and 70s that had vanished and that I’d love to have now. ..bruce..
July 31st, 2009 at 9:58 am
I just moved yesterday, so it is still on my mind:
4 boxes Mormon History
3 boxes biography
3 boxes American history
3 boxes philosophy/theology
1 box Transcendentalist studies
1 box Emerson’s journals
1 box Journal of Discourses
2 boxes American literature
1 box British literature
1 box Shakespeare
1 box world literature/Mormon literature
3 boxes journals (including Dialogue, JMH, JWHA, Church History, etc.)
1 box foreign language (my french and german, my wife’s spanish)
I think that’s about it.
July 31st, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Ardis (and others who have done wholesale pruning), you are clearly more evolved than I. My books still serve the function of proving (to whom? probably just me) that I’m smart–or was, 3 pregnancies and a dozen years of sleep deprivation ago. I have gotten rid of a lot over the years, both contemporary novels and other ephemera, and stuff that even I could tell was only there for my ego. I finally admitted that Hegel was just for show, although I kept Kant, despite the relatively low probability that I’ll curl up with the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft anytime soon!
August 1st, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I cannot imagine moving my books. I’m not very organized either and most would be labeled “Misc.” Estimating I would say I could do (in units of boxes): 10+ evolutionary biology & entomology; 10+ math and probability theory; 10+ philosophy of science; 10+ religion; 5+ nature and the environment; 5+ renaissance alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, mysticism (lest anyone think poorly of me, this all relates to the rise of science out of these subjects); 5+ fiction; 2 just on Darwin; 2 poetry; and scores and scores of a mixture all over the map. Sometimes all my books make me sick and I wish I had Ardis’ courage and could do some pruning. I know that 9/10ths of them I will never crack open again. But what if I need them sometime? Ack.
August 1st, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Apparently, former supreme court justice, David Souter is moving:
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090801/FRONTPAGE/908010365
partly because the old house, that had been in his family for 200 years “wasn’t structurally sound enough to hold the thousands of books that make up his library.”
My own shelves contain a lot more piano music than I will ever learn.
August 1st, 2009 at 8:01 pm
When we moved to Saudi, we got rid of ALL our books. It was heartbreaking. Unlike Ardis, I regret it very much. Since we have been back, I have constantly wished I had one book or another to refer to. So sad.
August 1st, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Kristine,
The loving care you devote to your books is a good indicator of the way you treat your friends. Don’t ever take any of your friends to Goodwill.
I have a 36-bookshelf lifetime rule, and I’m moving comfortably along at bookshelf 18 (from Wal-mart, in a box waiting to be assembled)–but that’s all work-related.
The milk-table from France gets all the oversized church books my mom sends me, the entertainment center has all the classics (including the beloved Treasure Island from third grade), and a short white bookshelf by the patio has the Harvard Classics collection.
As I was leaving Las Vegas for my fortress of solitude in Michigan from 2003-2005, I bumped into a woman who wanted to donate her husband’s collection of thrillers. The used bookstore owner, probably because it was a hot day, said she wasn’t interested — so I left for Michigan with a jeep full of twelve boxes of thrillers.
I quickly learned how to double my intelligence community thrill factor. If the books began, “It was a cold night in Berlin,” I kept them. If the bookx began, “It was a hot night in Nashville,” I turned them in to the local bookstore in exchange for more “cold night in Berlin” books.
So you get to be the diva of Mormon letters, and I just wait for the next Robert Littell novel to come out. I’m still a little disturbed by The Company and Legends. Actually, I’m on a pretty relentless non-fiction diet these days — e.g. the new Rumsfeld biography and an Daadler and Destler history of the national security adviser position.
We could interweave your books and my books and coauthor “Scowcroft’s People: The Constitution by a Thread Collection.” Sort of an LDS Umberto Eco project mixing Mormon esoterica with Byzantine modern national security plots: young J. Willard Marriott, George Romney, Brent Scowcroft, and H. W. St. Clair are convened into Church headquarters in Salt Lake in the early 1930s and told of a secret Joseph Smith scroll received from time-traveling do-gooders from the future; the four young men and their families are given the investment capital to create intertwined dynasties that struggles in a series of ten books to cross intellectual swords with a secretive transnational group known as “The Adversary.”
I don’t think the time-traveler thread works, though. Never mind!
August 2nd, 2009 at 9:49 am
Many years ago, in response to an e-mail from someone, I sketched a plot outline for an “Indiana Jones and the Lost Plates” story, set during the administration of George Albert Smith and involving a race to find what appeared to be the repository of all the Nephite history plates deep within a hill down in Central America. I had great fun with it; Indy’s love interest was Pres. Smith’s headstrong granddaughter. The Three Nephites made some appearances. It ended with Indy meeting again with Pres. Smith, telling him he was in that room, but that the room appeared to have vanished/been buried forever (I forget exactly what happened). As Indy takes his leave, he looks around and says, “Well, I don’t imagine I’ll be back here again.” After he’s gone, Pres. Smith smiles and says, “Oh, you will, Elder Jones, you will.” He then gets up, walks over to a hidden safe, removes the Urim & Thummin, the now-unsealed gold plates, and a thick bound notebook, brings them back to his desk, and then quietly continues his translation effort….
Shouldn’t that be “G&A, Ltd.”?