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I know just how you feel – I myself often quote Umberto Eco when people ask me if I’ve read all the books on my shelves (!) I am a gatherer – I need to know that I have enough reading material to last me for a long, long time, if books were to disappear from shops or if libraries were to become mere video games arenas. Thank you for yet another excellent blog. ‘Some people say that life is the thing, but I much The Strand, NYC the old nearly block-long Second Story Bookstore in Alexandria (long since demolished). Places I have been happy in: the NYPL, the Library of Congress reading and rare book rooms, the Folger Shakespeare library, my own house of books. An ironic joke: that one must rush there as a refuge lest it disappear: Still I like the sentiment of cherishing and the sense of deep pleasure of return to a permanent friend who is always there (again a fantasy I fear).
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On that one needs to read Carol Shields’s Mary Swann. I’m no fool and know that as an ordinary person it’s very unlikely I’ll ever get what these books are morally worth from a bookseller. The Admiral agrees and sometimes we find ourselves buying a book to make sure our section of this or that books has this particular item as it were for completion, for the sake of the library collection itself. And then what happens is I found I had a scholar’s library, a world of treasures I could live among. I had this experience for 8 years after I moved to Alexandria. My library is the product of a far more desperate urge: the fear I’ll be cut off from good libraries once I am not attached to a university as the libraries in the US are mostly impoverished. The trouble with Lewsis’s statement though is the nuances of imagery are slightly too complacent and make the library into a continual mother there for the child endlessly rereading the same passage in precisely the same way. Use as scholarly sources of information and insight. Ture, one need not read them all rather one need only want to read them and long to begin as they stay at the ready. Bernard Lewis, Notes on a century, 2012, pp. And even when not actually reading the book, merely looking at it on the shelf evokes that special pleasure one derives from ownership of some beautiful and cherished object. While reading appreciation of any particular passage is enhanced by the comfortable awareness that it will always be there - the same words, the same lines, the same pages - whenever one might chose to return to it.
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To begin with, one could chose the time and place of reading the book, unconstrained by the need to return it to the library or other lawful owner. What more can we say?’ (Carol Shields, Mary Swann).Īt an early age I made an important discovery that the pleasure of reading a good book could be greatly increased and renewed at will if one actually owned it. ‘Our books, dear Book Browser, are a comfort, a presence, a diary of our lives. While we were away in NYC a friend who liked my choice of quotations at Library Thing: I keep the others in my office.” (Eco, “How to justify a private library.”) Umberto Eco gave me ammunition long ago: when the person asks, sceptically, “Have you read them all?” I am to answer, “No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. ‘La bibliothèque devient une aventure’ (Umberto Eco quoted by Chantal Thomas, Souffrir). Altogether (upstairs in the attic, and downstairs in this 6 room house) we have some 40+ bookcases Since we joined Library Thing I know how many I do have: I appear to own 9810 books - downstairs.
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Or that on their second or third visit they will slyly acknowledge in some way that I live in a “library” as if I should try to hide this or they are saying something I will take offense at. I expect you will not be surprised to learn that people who visit me for the first time will ask me why I own so many books with the implication I need to justify this. And especially those who value books and own a goodly number.