A girl can't have too many shoes can she? In my case that also applies to bikes and books, the latter outnumbering the former by about 400:1 and I have ten bikes so do your own calculation.
I've just spent about £20 on six books, three by James Hillman, a retired professor of psychology and a Jungian psychotherapist, and three by Elaine Pagels, a professor of comparative religion or something similar. I've read books by both before and while hardly bedtime reading they cover subjects that fascinate me - people and the origins of Christianity. I'm not a believer as is well documented but I am fascinated by how a legend became gospel truth and the needs of people to believe it.
Quite where I'm going to put these books, I have no idea as I'm running out of space for storage, but we pseudo-intellectuals have to keep up the pretence of being intelligent and lots of books does give an impression of being well read. I suppose they also insulate the walls somewhat as well. The problem is that second hand books are so cheap from Abe even after postage and one is coming from the US, thus buying them is very tempting.
So apart from working too many hours, writing too much drivel and reading some even worse stuff on the net, I'm settling down to some serious stuff - a Calvin and Hobbes book.
Angharad.
Comments
Angharad, know how you feel
about books. I have way too many to be read and am still collecting more. I am also gettng books by site authors like Maddy so that I have a paperback edition of the electronic book.
May Your Light Forever Shine
You can never have too many books
... only insufficient shelving.
My library's up to about 13,000 books. It's overflowed from the room I set aside for a library to the lounge and one bedroom. I'm planning my retirement, and I've printed a FAQ for realtors/estate agents/architects on the care of books and the wallspace and other constraints needed for my library (including expansion allowance).
insufficient shelving
I've tentatively designed (I don't know if it's strong enough to hold the weight) a fold-out bookshelf that at chest high, will hold 5x what a similarly sized (height & width) shelf will hold with only about a 30-35% increase in width (room for the leaves to fold out), and of course 5 times the depth, with 1/2 the width room for the leaves to swing forward.
The shelf is divided into 2 halves that each have 2 folding leaves that will hold books on both the front and back. It folds something like this (top view).
___
> <
Outside of a dog
A book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog its too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
Books are not only best friends, they are treasured friends. Nothing beats the look, feel and smell of the printed page, IMHO. I do buy ebooks, mostly the more disposable romantic paranormal stuff I'd hate to have appear on my bookshelves; but a real book has a seduction all it's own.
Abe is a great source, especially for hard-to-find, out of print books. Each new book is lovingly placed on one of my many shelves when finished and easily found when desired again. Had a GF once who suggested I get rid of my books so she could move in with her two kids and each kid could have their own bedroom. I split up with her quickly. Wasn't interested in being the #2 mom anyway.
So keep buying those books, sis. That's a sign of culture, doncha know? ;-)
Calvin & Hobbs - not so much. :P
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
As someone who has broken the
As someone who has broken the 10 books / sq foot barrier, I have to say there is no such thing as too many books. However it appears that the 10 book /sq foot barrier is also the point where your building inspector uncle looses it over the fire and structural hazards that many books can cause.
Repost
I'd say that Calvin and Hobbes is _very_ serious reading. It's appeal is very strong because of the little child in all of us that just wants to be a bit rambunctions, a bit destructive, and a lot disturbing.
I know the feeling about 'where to put them'. I have something like 100 square feet of books, and have been trying to avoid buying more because I have a few stacks that won't fit on the shelves.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
275,000 books
Once, I owned a used book store that had been in existence since the early fifties, buying any book that came in and storing them in the basement. I did a rough count figuring fifty books per box, fifteen boxes high in a stack, two square feet per stack and a couple of rooms about 10x15 each came to 225,000 books. I had another 50,000 upstairs in the store itself. I became a used book wholesaler for other used bookstores. Bring a pick-up truck and you can load it full for $60. That came to about 1.6 cents a book. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Books
It's bad enough when one member of the household is a bibliophile but when two suffer the same (How shall I put this?)disorder, the whole living space becomes a literary disaster area.
Firstly I've still got all my books from my maritime career and 'uni' days;- that = one study wall.
My wife's got all her college books then literaly hundreds of books on child education that = another wall.
The other study wall has shelf after shelf of discs, memory sticks and even old floppy discs plus assorted dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc, etc.
Those who Skype me will bear witness to this for they are all behind my head as we talk.
My bedroom has one book case full of books that I really need to sort and so on and on and on.
My wife's back pantry is similarly stuffed full of boxes of her 'old books' (Can books grow old?)
The attic? Well don't go there; no I mean literally, DONT go there. I floored it out with proper 9" joists and flooring when we moved to the house and it now contains 37 years of book-hoarding.
How many books? God alone knows but it's the old adage 'have space:- will fill it'!
I just asked my better half how many books she thinks we've got all together and we shared a sort of guilty smile.
Keep on reading Ang, I know the joy it brings to such as us and the other contributers to this blog.
Bevs.
Books , Glorious Books..
I love em...
If I had room, I would buy more...
That's one of the reasons I went electronic... Less storage, more room and lots of books :)
hehe.
Reading without books
I love books, but I don't like owning them. Usually I read online or borrow books from the library. The few books I do own, I keep because I haven't read them yet.
A few years back I read an article (online, ironically) by a literary critic who believed that books can never be replaced by electronic media. It was mainly because he likes to write in his books - something I have rarely done and always regretted. And he had a book that he especially loved on which he once accidentally spilled tea. And so, these scribbles and stains make his books special to him.
I can understand that feeling of his. I just don't share it. For me, the book is mainly the content. I don't think he's wrong -- except in thinking that his feeling about books is universal, or objective.
I do more reading than the rest of the family combined, but only 20% of the books in our house belong to me, and I've been trying to cut that number down because we'll be moving in a couple of years. I've started donating to a book charity the ones I'm sure I'll never read. I'm not a numbers person, so I don't know the count, but I've gotten my pile of books down to two boxes, and I'm going to cut that in half in the next few months. (They're in boxes because I never unpacked them from the last move; I dig in every time I want to get a specific book.)
Maybe if I didn't move so often, or if I lived in a bigger place, or if I lived with people who weren't major accumulators of stuff, I might treat my books differently. But one never knows. I can't help but see them in terms of how much space they take and how heavy they are to carry.
In any case, I did determine one evening that if I could replace my books with electronic media, I would only want to keep five of my books as books. They are books that would be impossible to replace, and I had something to do with their creation, so they mean something personal to me, even though I've never scribbled in them or spilt tea over them.
Calvin And Hobbes
Will one day be accepted as great literature. That is a strip not only brilliant for its observations on human nature but also tremendous for its artwork, particularly when Calvin embodies dinosaurs,
Joanne
Pagels, Calvin & Hobbs
Pagels is a professor of religion at Princeton. I'm reading her "Gnostic Gospels" right now. It should appeal to this group as it includes the gospel according to Mary Magdalene. I loved "The Origin of Satan". I've always thought that some of her clarity of thought is reflected in her choice of a first husband, the very distinguished theoretical physicist Heinz Pagels. She used to frequently appear on the history channel's programs on religion, before they moved far to the right, and started featuring professors from seminaries that require more faith than scholarship in their faculty.
Of course Calvin and Hobbs are a theologian and a philosopher.
Sure, I have too many books, but I tend to re-read them. The second time through is frequently better, as I have , hopefully, learned a few things in the passing years. The third reading can frequently be thrilling.
I'm building our last house now. It features 50 % more room for books then we presently have books. The bookcases feature library ladders, thanks to Borders going out of business, and are perfect for anautodidact and an english preofessor. I hope to fill them before I die.
Liz