List your entire library here

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Re: List your entire library here

Postby stefano » Fri Dec 03, 2010 8:41 am

Montag wrote:Hmmm... Looks like Stephen, Barra and me, are the only ones willing to divulge our libraries.
I'm willing but have just been too lazy. How do you do it, do you go to the bookcases and make a shorthand list, then type it out? Or go to the books, remember a few, then back to the keyboard to type our their titles? Or sit cross-legged in front of the books with a laptop? Thanks, though, to those who have employed these methods and others I may not have thought of - this thread makes for very interesting browsing.

I liked Annie's efficient approach to the thing. It being Friday and me having no work but tax admin, I've taken some photos, cropped and uploaded them.

English fiction, plays and poetry. The books I collected as a kid, including substantial PG Wodehouse and Tom Sharpe stashes, are at my parents'.
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Religion and related.
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Biography. Jenna Jameson's is a borrowed book. Crazy crazy story.
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Non-fiction. The one without a spine is called The feeling of what happens by Antonio Damasio, it's quite good. I got all six volumes of Gibbon last week for the price of two beers, don't know when I'll get around to them. I paid the lady then told her she really should put her prices up.
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Reference stuff.
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French.
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Afrikaans.
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Textbooks and economics.
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Current loo reading is Monty Python's Flying Circus scripts. Bedside table has Our Kind of Traitor by Le Carré, armchair by the window in the lounge has The Golden Bough by Frazer.
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Re: List your entire library here

Postby semper occultus » Sun Dec 05, 2010 6:30 pm

right Stafano..what's with all the typing ferchrissakes...and did I see really The Sacrament of Abortion upthread ?!
anyway loath as I am to expose my vulgar taste to the withering scrutiny of my fellow board member's rarefied intellects :

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Re: List your entire library here

Postby Elvis » Mon Dec 06, 2010 4:33 am

Just the thought of typing up all the titles of my books made me want to go lie down and take a nap. There's about 1200 books in the living room and a few more hundred mostly in boxes in my bedroom/office. (Almost all non-fiction.)

As to "why keep more books on hand than one can read in a year," well, that's just silly.

Even if I did type up a list, it wouldn't necessarily reflect my choices. A lot of my books "found me," as it were. For example, I got a lot books when I acquired most of the library of an Oxford-schooled Methodist bishop who was active in the early 20th century. Lots of philosophy, and history, including a bunch on pre-Christian groups like the Essenes and Qumran etc. (seemed to be an interest of his); my copy of the Nag Hammadi library came from his collection. I made a mint off selling his numerous books about John Wesley, the year of the Wesley Tricentennial, when anything "Wesley" was being snapped up at ridiculous prices.

The boxed-up books I don't really count, they're mostly early-1900s Christian hermeneutics by people at places like the Yale divinity school where they struggled---and I mean struggled---to rationalize faith. You read a few and there's not much point in going further. No one wants to buy them so I just hang on to them for now.

I've done a few weedings to free up shelf space (I just recently hauled about 40 outdated technical books to the "free" boxes at a used book store), and those books remaining I'd like to read eventually. I won't get to them all, I'm sure, but lately I've been digging in to the histories ("A Short History of England" at the moment).

Most of my library is history, political science, philosophy etc. I've got a "JFK" section, a "UFO" section, a Third Reich section (abutting the "Nixon" section) and so on. Numerous "intel' subjects, bios of the early OSS/CIA dudes etc. and just a ton of miscellaneous interesting stuff. Plus a godawful pile of oddball periodicals and pamphlets etc.

If the FBI ever examined my books, as they're known to do when trying to get a handle on someone's perspective, they'd be baffled. "We can't figure out where this guy's comin' from..."

I guess I'm still finding the way there.

I seem to be prattling...blasted urge to self-expression. But, interesting thread, thanks.

PS - impressive libraries you all have! I see a bit overlap with mine.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: List your entire library here

Postby Canadian_watcher » Thu Mar 03, 2011 3:39 pm

and them some of us didn't buy and/or keep all the books we've read. So our library is like...
the library.
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.-- Jonathan Swift

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him. -- Jonathan Swift
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Re: List your entire library here

Postby winston smith » Thu Dec 22, 2011 10:01 am

Overflow of books at my office.

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Re: List your entire library here

Postby Inkwhyring » Tue Mar 13, 2012 6:12 pm

Do any of you read fiction,for Petes' sake?I realize books are a great way to learn,but I guess I use them as more of an escape,into another place,and time!A good fiction book,to me,is better than any movie-well,if it's written well enough,it IS the movie-in your imagination!I just wondered what fiction books any of you are partial to,if any?By the standard of,the words alone created the setting,characters,etc.in your head,in a vivid and real way,?Like,for me,here are a few:Oliver Twist.Lonesome Dove.A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.Watership Down.Harry Potter.Gotta go,would like to hear from any of you. :tiphat:
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Re: List your entire library here

Postby Hammer of Los » Wed Mar 14, 2012 7:24 am

...

Holy Mother of God Semper. You could start a conspiracy lending library with that little lot! Just to clarify, you were referring to me specifically with that "rarefied intellects" remark, weren't you? Good. I just wanted to straighten that out.

And might I just add that I love love love Elvis. He can be my new philosophy buddy.

No, I couldn't list my library. I wouldn't want to even bother listing fiction. I might photograph a small part of my philosophy section. It represents a small fraction of the materials I own. Which also represents a small fraction of the materials I have read. The mind of man through time has been my constant study.

There is a space on my bookshelf that is empty though. It used to hold my copy of Fritjof Capra's "The Tao of Physics."

I lent it to my buddhist doctor. He told me he is reading it. He is finding it interesting.

He gave me his email. I may give him some of my 110% crazy wisdom teaching.*

It's probably too much for him though. I don't think I'll become a guru, after all. I'll just stick with being a househusband.

You see, it was reading all those philosophy books that did it. It turned me into the sorcerer supreme, master of the mystic arts. It's just a joke; although my nan always told me that I had the most marvellous imagination:

http://www.allthingswilliam.com/imagination.html wrote:
He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.
~ William Blake, in The Life of William Blake, Volume II (1863). Prose Writings. Descriptive Catalogue, Number IV (1809)

Imagination, the real and eternal world, of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable, mortal bodies are no more.
~ William Blake, from Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion (1804).

To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but mediately to the understanding or reason?
~ William Blake, in The Letters of William Blake (1906). Letter to the Reverend John Trusler (23 August 1799)

The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.
~ William Blake, from Milton, a Poem in 2 Books (1804).

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity ... and some scarce see Nature at all. But, to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is imagination itself.
~ William Blake, in The Letters of William Blake (1906). Letter to the Reverend John Trusler (23 August 1799)

The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated [i.e. mortal] body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.
~ William Blake, from A Vision of the Last Judgment (c. 1810).

To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.
~ William Blake, from Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion (1804).

What is now proved was once only imagined.
~ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93). Proverbs of Hell





:lovehearts: :angelwings: :lovehearts:

* apologies to Chogyam Trungpa

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