I’m Book-Poor, But I’m Happy
I have a lot of books. I’ve been reading since I was four, and collecting — no, amassing is more accurate — books since I was old enough to have pocket money. Last estimate was about 24,000 books in my house. Most of them were boxed up in the attic until recently, because my house is very small, and I couldn’t fit in enough bookshelves to have all my books out.
But, at the end of February, I packed everything up and sent it to storage while we remodeled. We’re starting to move stuff back into the house now, and the first thing I unpacked was the books that have been in the attic for the last ten years. I’m going through them and sorting them into categories, eliminating duplicates, identifying and protecting valuable volumes, and organizing my home library. And reading them to see if I want to keep them, of course.
It’s fun. I’m reading books I’d forgotten I had, on all kinds of topics. I found six copies of one book — it’s still one of my favourites, but I am keeping the first edition and one nice reading copy, and selling the rest. No matter how wonderful the book, I just don’t need six copies!
I just finished My Sister and I: The Diary of a Dutch Boy Refugee, by Dirk van der Heide, and am starting on The George MacDonald Treasury, which includes eight of MacDonald’s books. The van der Heide was quite good — it’s the diary of a 12-year-old boy who survived the first two bombings of Rotterdam in the Netherlands in the early days of WWII. It’s a small volume, but it’s packed full of details, and the perspective is unique. The MacDonald book is good — MacDonald is a superb writer who lived in the nineteenth century — but the editing is dreadful. I have noticed many misspellings and other mistakes — occupational hazard of being a professional editor: you notice these things even when you’re reading for pleasure.
In any case, it’s wonderful to see what books I have and to begin to see a way to organize and display them. I have some real treasures, and I look forward to reading them all.
2 Comments
And I thought I had quite a collection! 🙂
While dusting shelves, the chore often is delayed, sometimes forgotten, because I start rereading old but timelessly enduring books.
You said you were going to display your books. I think we should all take a photo of our bookcase just full of books, or the pile of books on the floor… It would be fun seeing the whole picture of what people read. Maybe I’ll start a new photo blog.