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I just wrote what was supposed to be a couple of paragraphs of reaction to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
siderea's post about Marie Kondo and books, which turned into multiple pages of feelsdump about tidying and really the only parts that need to see the light of day are
Derry Girls is fine, I guess, but if you've watched one of the Sister Michael compilation vids you're probably good stopping thereand
(A story about a large donations-sorting center that has some kind of magical heatsink/storage battery for all the bad vibes from the spirits of trashed once-beloved objects is something I would like to read, please. Anyone who thinks Westerners don’t understand animism of made objects has never helped sort junk donations on a large scale and seen what people couldn’t bear to throw away. We’re just deeply uncomfortable with it because most of us don’t have a good framework to understand it in. Can we call the story "The Joy Equations"? Can we power an FTL drive with the accumulated spiritual sadness of the debris of the Age of Excess?)Anyway, what it was meant to be an intro to: I have finally finished all of the small tasks I could pretend were "preparation" and have to face the next piece of my ongoing tidying project: fit ~400 unshelved nonfiction books onto ~6 available feet of linear shelf space.
Okay yes that seems comically impossible on the face of it, but I think I can squeeze a fair amount of more space by accepting that all the rest of the nonfiction will just have to be shelve for maximum space use instead of attractiveness of shelves, and also weed about 10%-15% of the collection as I go.
It's the weeding that's going to be hard. Most of these books have already survived multiple weeds, and I don't buy any new ones unless:
- they make me happy.
- I could not easily get another copy if I needed one on short notice* (i.e., they aren't the sort of thing that's on every library shelf and in every used bookstore in fifteen copies, they aren't constantly in print, and if they're public domain they either don't have a digital copy available free yet or there's a reason I want a physical copy instead.)
- they fit into a certain short list of topics of special interest that I am likely to find useful at some point.
*being able to get them on Amazon doesn't count because Amazon is evil and also I don't let myself bookshop on Amazon because I have enough of a problem already. Being able to get them in non-free-to-share ebook doesn't count because just because they're accessible in ebook now doesn't mean they will be later, and just because I have them saved as files now doesn't mean I'll be able to access the files later: learned that one hard and early.
This list is fairly static over time and fairly well refined at this point, and most of the books I buy these days fit into more than one category on it (at 3+ it's pretty much a lock to buy.) But I realized it also only existed in my head and it might be a useful exercise to write it out.
Not comprehensive, but hopefully close. And a lot of the categories are more refined than the best wording I've come up with so far, but these are pretty close.
- adult coloring books that are either x-rated adult or have informational content
- african-american culture, race
- ancient history
- anthropology of aesthetics and epistemology
- artificial intelligence
- asexuality and singlehood
- backpacking and hiking
- biblical exegesis & apocrypha
- bibliophibianism
- blank books for sketching or commonplace books
- cartography
- classic/historical feminism
- daily life in military service, religious communities, and other closed societies
- death
- design in popular culture
- disability cultures and histories
- disasters and apocalypses
- dollhouse miniatures
- early aviation history and fighter pilots
- Easy to low intermediate piano books (with songs I want to play)
- epidemiology
- ethology and domestication
- etymology, toponymy, historical linguistics
- fanworks and intellectual property rights
- fiction that has been specifically recommended to me or fills in a series I've reread
- field guides
- fire
- folk and historical textile arts
- folklore and fold knowledge generally
- fun with math & statistics & logic
- history of games
- gender and kinship across cultures
- historical cookery
- historic costume
- historical sex and etiquette books and householders' companions
- history of the blues
- Iceland
- invertebrate biology
- anthropology case studies
- kites
- local history (for locations I have a personal connection to)
- Lutheranism
- mad science
- mid-20th century or earlier comics, especially non-superhero
- mythology and religion
- native americans and the precolumbian americas
- naturalists' lives
- neuroscience case studies
- Newspaper comics
- paleontology
- paranormal/pseudoscience/mystical/magical/general weird stuff topics
- plants and fungi
- poetry in translation
- polar & alpine exploration
- primitive skills/wilderness survival/self-sufficiency/things to do after global civilization collapses/etc.
- public transit, vernacular architecture, and urban design
- radio
- rogue economists
- science fiction and poetry writing
- sketching and watercolor, scientific illustration
- space exploration and travel, planetary bodies
- pre-1970s children's books, especially Stratemeyer Syndicate ones
- historic spies and pirates
- Symbology, codicology, paleography, calligraphy
- taxonomy and evolution
- the labor movement
- the global middle ages
- things relevant to writing Captain America or Les Miserables canon periods or old copies of Hugo novels
¯_(ツ)_/¯
LOOK I HAVE A LOT OF SPECIAL INTERESTS OKAY
And yes I really do need multiple books on all these topics. I mean right now I'm working on an art project that so far requires books on calligraphy, Norse and Saxon decorative design, historic costume illustration, the history of playing cards, the Lewis chessmen, swords, and medieval cartography. And I did need all four calligraphy books because one has facsimiles of actual historic scripts, one has stroke-by-stroke (but less historically accurate) instructions for all the scripts, one has fewer scripts but teaches you about design as well as handwriting, and one has illuminated capitals.
And my current fanfiction project requires an equally tall stack on religion, 1st century history, the early Christian church, Jewish folklore and angelology.
And I just loaned a friend several books on knotwork and macrame for her newest project.
And I have another pile of Taoist-influenced philosophy and ancient China sitting aside for whenever I get back to working on The Book of Force Powers and/or writing Kunlun fic.
My books are, on the whole, not just sitting idly on the shelves, because I try not to get ones that will. (Hopefully at least 10-15% of them are though! That's the dream.)
...at least I have a nice starter list of tags to use in the catalog as I re-shelve?
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and/or writing Kunlun fic.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!
/is super-predictable
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Also tbf: there are not really all that many things that *aren't* on that list, one way or another. :P
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So I haven't had the luxury of owning paper books for a very long time, but I also have never been a "bibliophibian" anyway. I go through phases of reading ten books in a day, but I also go through months where I don't read a single book, where I may not even keep up with my friends' fanfic output. I owned perhaps a dozen paper books before this last bout of homelessness, perhaps three dozen before I left Indiana. I can't own a lot of physical objects or I get overstimulated and overwhelmed.
When I was studying geology, that was a problem. Geologists have rocks *everywhere*. They carry their own body weight in rocks up and down mountains. A geology lab is a place with rocks stacked on every available surface. So I'd come back from a geology field trip with one fossil shell I found, because that was what I liked, and people would be earnestly trying to give me some of their rock samples because they were so sorry that I hadn't found enough.
I feel a little like that about bibliophibians. I can't speak to Marie Kondo, but within that intellectual subculture, there's definitely this particular expectation (even among librarians) that one should desire to own all the books. That one will want to own all the books. It does not occur to people in this particular class that one might wish to own only a few select books but could still be a ridiculously overeducated, hyperintelligent tortoise.
I'm falling asleep with my eyes open, so hopefully this is wordful.
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Anyway collecting books is certainly a lifestyle choice and not an ethical or moral one! I have one shelf of fiction that I re-read as an emotional coping mechanism, pretty much, and everything else is basically for reference. I have a pretty good memory for things I've read, but I think I've read too many neuroscience case studies and skepticism books, because I don't trust my own memory, so I find it very comforting to my mental health to have the books around to check back and verify that I'm not just imagining things.
(That's my main thought on the Marie Kondo books thing - she said in her first book that nobody should ever own more than X specific number of books, and a lot of book people objected to that, and then a lot of non-book people said, "She never said that! You're being racist!" and then I have to back out of the discussion entirely because I'm 99% sure she did say that and that the non-book people didn't actually read the book. But of course, ironically, I don't own a copy because I didn't think I needed one, so I can't check back, so the whole thing just gives me An Anxiety about the nature of reality.)
I'm always a little weirded out by people who say things about The Book Subculture in general because I am about as deep in that subculture as it's possible to get, and it never matches my experience of it at all? Book people tend to be like "I know I have a weird hobby but you do you", be very aware that books have almost no resale value, and not put much any class or intelligence markers on books ownership general. (Which is another place I disagree with siderea - there are definitely certain classes that are more likely to be bibliophibians, and it often is a marker of I Can Collect This Now Because I Have Made It In Society, like any other large collection, but it's just as likely to be retired factory workers with no degrees and a house full of Harlequins as PhDs in Cambridge. And because books don't have much resale value, used books are a lot more class-neutral than collecting, say, cars or antique silver or designer shoes.)
And people who collect model trains or pictures of lighthouses are a lot less likely to get people complaining that they're elitists who think anybody who doesn't own five model train layouts and at least one mug shaped like the Cape Hatteras Light is stupid.
Most of the things people complain about as Book Culture (TM) are things that most Book People I know would never dream of doing. They are things that Intellectual Snobs Who Own At Most One Bookshelf And Think That's A Lot Of Books tend to do. Sometimes they are things People Who Are Trying To Impress Intellectuals do (often in magazine articles) or Things That People Who Are Trying To Market Bookstores do. Those are not Book People. Real book people get most of their books at the Goodwill and the Friends of the Library sale, and spend all their time moaning about how they are personally victimized by their to-read list and they will probably die buried under a collapsed bookshelf and they have an addiction problem.
I also dunno why people always namecheck librarians here because librarians in my fairly extensive experience tend to have 0 respect for books as physical artifacts and frequently have relatively small personal libraries (because they are always reading library books.) We will lecture a customer for damaging them but that's because they're a shared resource, not because they are physically sacred! (We will lecture you and then once you are gone, drop it in the recycle bin with a shrug.)
Becoming a library worker has been very bad for my book habit specifically, but that's because I now know far too much about how our local library's collection management works, which means I have a very fine-tuned idea of the books I won't be able to find in the library if I need to reference them (basically anything that hasn't had a new printing in the last four years and/or isn't from a major publisher. Which covers most of my interests.) Also because librarians get first pick of the withdrawn books, so they can build a personal library basically without even trying if not careful.
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I haven't actually read Marie Kondo's book, and at this point if I do I'll just turn into a "somebody is Wrong on the internet" in the discourse about it. ;P I might someday, but you know.
Honestly my sense of how many physical books people own is probably skewed, because all my friends are in the internet. My comparisons are Kat, my bio-family (not an inch of wall space that lacked a bookshelf), and people who write thinkpieces in the general tone of Siderea's post. Kat is lovely and will bring me infinite books if I want them but does not pester me when I'm not in a reading mood. My bio-family does judge people hard for owning insufficient books but would also judge you (nonspecific) for the way you breathe, they're very elitist and relatively poor and come from specifically a Roman Catholic spin on Great Books(tm) academic culture but are not themselves career academics, that may be a formative part of how I picture Book People and how I interpret things like those quote bags that say "I cannot live without books". I'm thinking out loud here but that makes sense. And thinkpiece people who insist on regarding physical books as sacred artifacts irritate the fuck out of me. (The "kids these days and their Kindles" line in Siderea's post has really put my back up.) I'm on... at least my fourth copy of LOTR, because I read the first three literally to pieces.
I can be a bit precious about editions when it comes to illustrated books, the pictures need to be the correct ones - I forget what book I was looking at, but I was in Barnes and Noble and I picked up a book I'd been thinking about owning again and it had been reillustrated, quite nicely but the author's original illustrations were gone, and it felt oddly like something had been violated. The colorized Garth Williams illustrations in the latest anniversary release of Little House are the same way for me. But the... soul of a book, I guess, the words themselves? As long as it's not abridged, the particular physical book is fungible. And thinkpiece people tend to put my back up with reverence about irrelevancies like the smell of decaying paper (which at least Siderea had the sense not to).
"spend all their time moaning about how they are personally victimized by their to-read list and they will probably die buried under a collapsed bookshelf and they have an addiction problem."
This does coincide with the fringes of book tumblr I have wandered near. My aggressive curation of my blogrolls probably means I don't have an actual sense of Book Culture, or of any culture beyond (right now) my current microfandom, but I have seen these posts. I had thought of them as likely containing a significant proportion of tumblresque exaggeration, because the people I know who actually keep to-read lists are fairly undramatic about it (especially Pedanther, who keeps a Dreamwidth mostly for his monthly reading logs and seldom even comments on the books unless asked). But I hang out with undramatic people in general. ^_^
This still may not be coherent, I apologize if any of it comes across as trying to argue, rather than as mildly sleep-deprived rambling.
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And, yeah, there are definitely individual librarians who hoard books! I am also one of them. But in my experience even book-hoarder librarians don't tend to evangelize about how all people need to buy books (since their main job involves convincing people that they don't need to buy them, we have them all right here for free...)
Reading KonMari and doing a "wrong on the internet" discourse is practically a write of passage at this point. :P I don't really think you'd have much to learn from it, though. (I didn't really either - it's mostly stuff I got with my mother's milk. That somehow did not prevent the book-and-fabric-hoarding issue.)
The "smell of decaying paper" thing also gets on my nerves, because I've only ever personally encountered that smell on books that are ~100 years old - the chemical makeup of paper and ink and so on changes over time, so newer books usually don't seem to have that as the predominant smell. So if you're rhapsodizing over vanilla scents, you're either a rich bastard with an ancestral library, or you don't really spend much time around old books.
I am absolutely with you there on the editions and illustrations! I have some books from my adolescence where I have to have exactly the right cover and illustrator. There's definitely a distinction between "books as a collection of information" and "books as attractive physical objects" that a lot of people on both sides of the discussion often seem to miss - I have some books that I definitely do own mostly because I enjoy them as sensory things (in the same way I have scarves I never wear but like to run my hands over) but I have many, many more books I would happily dump for a better version of the same information if I had one.
...and the collapsed bookshelf thing is maybe sort of a joke in that tumblr way where people have died that way and I've had multiple close calls where I've been like 'if that had fallen at a slightly different angle I would be in trouble' and we're all legitimately worried about the trustworthiness of the floor in my uncle's second-story library and if I developed a physical disability I would be looking at a very different cull. (I do not recommend living this way. I also do not recommend living in a ~200 sq foot bedroom with ~3000 books in it and yet here I am.)
There is definitely an aspect to the book collector hobby where relatively few people spent their childhoods being told they had to be super into dolls or they were stupid and would die poor and unloved. And there are definitely asshole book collectors just like anything else. And that can make people react more strongly to the whole thing, too.
But honestly I think a lot of the "I Cannot Live Without Books" type stuff are being increasingly adopted by Kindle addict types these days - I don't even necessarily think of that as being related to being a collector of physical books. (I cannot live without books because I need something to take me out of my head on demand or I go into spirals, but that is equally well served by ebooks or audio.)
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I FEEL SO CALLED OUT RIGHT NOW lol
(All of the wall space in our bedroom is taken up by bookshelves. We live in Seattle and my partner says if the Big One hits during our lifetime, we're toast.)
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We were here for Nisqually (the big earthquake in 2001) but were living in a much "bigger" space (a converted basement which also included unfinished garage) and I had a lot fewer....well no come to think of it I didn't have fewer books. I had fewer bookshelves. Which is another thing I never see in these articles. A lot of the time bibliophile types have libraries that overflow the bookshelves, but they also just don't have ENOUGH bookshelves. Did you see those pictures of Neil Gaiman's library in his basement? It was the library of someone who FINALLY had ENOUGH BOOKSHELVES. It was like the entire refinished basement.
....speaking of digital archiving, I just tried clicking on the original link for those photos in a Shelfari blog, and got taken to "Shelfari has merged with Goodreads. Take a look around and let us know if you have any questions or need any assistance." The internet is forever, but the internet also eats information like children eat candy. If not for the wayback machine....
https://web.archive.org/web/20120107224158/http://blog.shelfari.com/ronbrinkmann/2009/08/gaimans-bookshelf-details.html
(I remember when I showed those photos to my partner. He turned white.)
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Oh, how that happened to me. I was a work-study student in libraries all through college (which involved, like, two different private colleges, a community college, and two state U's). And then I worked in a small not-used bookstore and we got first pick of all the ARCs that got sent to the owner by publishers to see whether or not he would sell the book. And we had employee discounts, and he let us use those on top of special discount sales. And....yeah.
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Oh god this. I have a firm rule that nothing I acquire from work goes home until after I've read it and made a conscious decision to keep it, and the practical side effect of this is that I just end stuffing all my cubical file cabinets with books.
I own a lot of books because the thought of a perfectly good book being thrown away makes me sad, not because I view them as a Status Symbol or anything to do with my intellectual worth. I am honestly kind of baffled at the amount of money some people spend on buying books. I mean, I'm glad they do, because they're keeping authors and publishers afloat. But for me, books are dust bunnies: things that accumulate constantly if you don't keep up with your sweeping.
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51 is more-or-less unpackable into, in roughly Dewey order:
general forteana and anomalistics
shipwrecks and buried treasures
hollow and flat earths, lost continents, and other alternate geographies
ufology and xenoanthropology
cryptozoology
hoaxes and stage magic
scientific skepticism
ritual magic
historic witchcraft, conjure, hexwork, etc.
trance, hallucinations, and other altered states
parapsychology
ghosts
divination (especially cleromancy)
feng shui and energy work
fairylore and its allies
forbidden, occult, or channelled texts
secret societies and conspiracy theories
pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology
true crime and unsolved mysteries
cryptology
alchemy
posthumanism and futurism
medical oddities
labyrinths and mazes, subterranean cities
mysterious places
other generally Weird and Offbeat Things (like, I don't usually go for health and diet stuff except from a skeptical POV, but I couldn't resist a book on Breatharianism. And I'm not sure what subcategory the guide to founding your own micronation belongs in.)
...plus all the stuff that shades into folklore/religion/mad science/etc.
self-sufficiency is things like:
treehouses, teepees, etc.
foraging
stone tools
shipbuilding and sailing
knots and ropework
basic mechanical repair
beekeeping
vegetable gardening & homesteading
woodworking and carving
basketweaving
backpacking, walking, and camping
manual navigation
weather forecasting
fishing and trapping, preparing game and leatherwork
parlor games
food preservation, distillation, practical chemistry
various recipe books for making things from scratch like glue, and gelatin hektographs (I don't have much on guns but I have instructions for gunpowder, slowmatch, and flashpaper from scratch! Also rocket fuel. And how to prospect for uranium ore.)
general collections of Old Crafts and Trades and How Things Used To Be Done (like Foxfire)
And a lot of it blur into other categories too: field guides, mad science, folklore, all the textile stuff, etc.
A lot of subsets of this would be on the list but I pulled it from books I own and it's hard to find on those topics: like, most pottery books assume you are using storebought clay and an electric kiln, so I don't buy them, and it's basically impossible to find anything on making essential oils from scratch.
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Are any of the books unread so far? I had some luck going through my TBR, because there were books in there in which I was no longer interested; or when I opened them, I found I didn't like the style or whatever, and realized I wouldn't read them.
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I mean, really, the lack of shelf space and the need to cull are certainly related issues, but I would still need to cull if I had infinite shelf space, because this is in fact Too Many Books.
I doubt there are many on topics where I'm not interested because I generally don't buy books unless they're on that list of special interest subjects that I've been persistently excited about since high school. (I don't tend to drop interests like some people do, just refine old ones and add new ones.) I suspect the vast majority of the culls will be ones that are just badly written (if I pick them up for a quarter because I like the topic, I don't usually check reviews first) or are almost 100% redundant with other ones in the collection. Unfortunately that kind of weeding takes a lot more time than one based just on topic. And is much more likely to result in me accidentally reading them instead.
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The ebook thing is a) every single backup data drive I've ever owned has failed on me in less than five years; b) I have had multiple "cloud services" go down on me and lose my data without any offers of backups; c) most of my initial crop of ebooks from when they were new and shiny are already in a format that is no longer readable or easily convertible; and d) I have had books that I thought would be easily available online forever suddenly disappear from their only source. And also that there is no archival digital data storage method that is known to be reasonably reliable, without ongoing maintenance, for more than about ten years.
So in theory, if I had an ebook I wanted easily accessible for the forseeable future, I could (often illegally) strip DRM and then keep multiple copies on both local and cloud backups (which aren't all dependent on the same corporation) that I'm making sure to do regular maintenance and checks on (and for the cloud services, probably paying subscription fees) or... I could buy a paperback copy for $.50 and the money goes to charity and still have it in seventy years with no effort. Shelf space is kind of a hassle, but so is digital data upkeep, and for me personally, shelf space is easier.
There are also other reasons I prefer paper for nonfiction in particular, but yeah, that's part of it.
For disposable fiction reading I am fine with ebooks, but I have AO3 for that anyway! (And I'm in the early stages of putting together a calibre library of AO3 ebooks to store on a solid-state drive as a test of whether that will actually work for long-term library purposes.)
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Ahahaha this made me so twitchy. But yeah. I have stuff on the cliche floppy drives in a desk drawer. I think they might as well be fan themed coasters by now.
So in theory, if I had an ebook I wanted easily accessible for the forseeable future, I could (often illegally) strip DRM and then keep multiple copies on both local and cloud backups (which aren't all dependent on the same corporation) that I'm making sure to do regular maintenance and checks on (and for the cloud services, probably paying subscription fees) or... I could buy a paperback copy for $.50 and the money goes to charity and still have it in seventy years with no effort. Shelf space is kind of a hassle, but so is digital data upkeep, and for me personally, shelf space is easier.
Yeah, I often wonder about what is going to happen when my Kindles crap out (I still have the first one I ever got). Do I lose all my notes? How do I back those up exactly? Will they be easily accessible? Do I keep a list of everything on the Kindle so I can back it up elsewhere? What if something happens and I can't open those files? &c &c &c. I have enough hang-ups about permanence already, and thinking that a now not-insignificant portion of my entire library might vanish into the aether Does Not Help. But I really can't do the casual book-buying "Oh I might read this" pickup of 10-20 paperbacks in one weekend at my little local used bookstore that I used to do, because I literally do not have the room anymore.
-- I actually did have to sell a large part of my library after grad school, for financial reasons, and a very nice used bookstore in Santa Fe paid me incrementally probably about $500 for what was maybe like 2,000 books. I thought I was okay with it at the time but after (this was before online cataloguing, and I hadn't done manual tracking) I was driven CRAZY by thinking I had a book when I didn't. I also did two big book culls before I went to college, with the result that now a lot of books I had as a kid/adolescent are gone but I no longer remember what they were. :P But those were voluntary. And even then, when I got to college and brought most (not all) of my library along with me, I still had paperbacks stacked up along the walls. My friends were like: "You come to a school with a giant library and Great Books Program and you BROUGHT books here?"
(Oh ghod, I'm not saying this to brag. //horrified I'm saying, it's Just Me, like the colour of my eyes or the length of my fingers, but it is also A PROBLEM. It is not a lifestyle I would recommend. Altho maybe I could get a cutesy Salon.com type article out of it, who knows.)
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I don't buy much fiction anymore, unless it's something I really do need a reference copy for, or I know isn't available in good ebook. But most of my fiction reading is library books, library ebooks, AO3, and online SF magazines, so I've never really felt the need to buy many ebooks anyway, tbh. If I want something ephemeral to read, that's what Overdrive is for. And ebooks are still ephemeral until they figure out the technology a bit more.
If I didn't have the stable living situation though, I would probably have put a lot more work into a curated ebook library. (...but I did put a lot of work into a curated digital music archive, and then lost the drive it was on...)
I only took ten books a semester to college! I was going to Be Good and Enjoy The Amazing Resources Of The University! It sort of backfired, because me getting into fanfic is 100% due to the fact that I didn't have my Harry Potter books to re-read sophomore year, so I had to find an alternative...
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Oh man, I don't even know what might have happened if I'd had a reliable internet connection in college. (I was in the generation where you still had to go to the campus computer center to download your mail.)
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