Midnight Pub

the merits of a bookshelf

~tetris

I was talking with a friend the other day about a certain book series by a certainly now-dead author, and he mentioned that he downloaded the series from a certain website, and that once he was sure about liking the series, he'd bought a physical copy of it as well.

"Why?" I asked, revealing my somewhat cutlass views on paying artists and their estates directly for their works, and screwing the middleman as much as possible.

"To show on my bookshelf", he replied.

I looked at my own. It was a collection of loose notes, pizza pamphlets, various letters or bills, random little boxes full of mysteriously labeled USB sticks, and a few straggling pop-fiction books I was gifted.

If anyone was to walk into my house and peruse my bookshelf, they'd assume I was an illiterate uncultured swine who never pays his dues on time (and they'd be half right).

My actual bookshelf disappeared about 10 years ago, where I packed up my treasured collections into the loft at my mothers house and began collecting digital books in a folder on my main backup drive. Instead of lugging books from house to house and country to country, I just sync my mobile with the "Books" folder on this networked drive.

But I can't flaunt that to guests. I can just only nod my head and say "yes I've read that", without being able to prompt anything back. Its like I exist without a history, my brain remembering books I've read only in the moment, and never recalling their existence until someone else brings it up.

A person without a bookshelf is just a shadow of themselves, trapped in a rich inner world that no one can discover. Maybe that's nice for some, but I want to be a sociable creature again, who can point to physical evidence of his worth not by the content of his words, but by the content of his bookshelf!

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Replies

~sonam wrote (thread):

My bookshelf is not as filled because I have a very bad habit of giving away my books. Also, I almost always lend my books, knowing full well in advance, that I'll never get them back.

~contrarian wrote (thread):

Possessing a library that's not a mobile library is an extremely classist thing. There is something to be said for supporting creators by buying physical goods mostly while they're alive. Middlemen are important curators in our lives.

Physical items have a provenance to them while files just have metadata.

~2pie wrote (thread):

In sort of the same situation except that I rent my book at the library rather than buying them. The thing is that I hate buying the physical object. I feel so committed when I buy a book, it's more than I can handle! It is not only the price, but also the physical object.

I am always in a state where I know that I could move out in less than a year, and carrying a lot of books is quite painful when moving out (I must say that I have no furniture, so I can move out with just a car, in one trip).

Maybe a solution is keep a "map" of the book you've read, that you display on your living room. This way people can see how literate you are and it is an interesting starting point for discussion.

For instance you have the 'science fiction area', the 'russian 19th century area'... You can even make links between them !

Just had this idea while reading your post, I think I will start my own right away :)

~inquiry wrote (thread):

Oh, puhleeeez! Just show 'em

your huge.. body of Midnight Pub work

and they'll be right back in the throes of the opinion of you that you *know* they ought be captive-ated by!

;-)

I'm lucky along those lines in that I'm all but certain I've already found all the paper books I'll ever need due to being sufficiently old to forget most of what I've read after not too long, so re-reading them doesn't feel the exercise in futility it once did.

I finally deleted the "Kindle" app off my phone the other day after clicking on it and noting what looked like a ton of happy horse shit of trying to remember userid, password, resetting either or both, and the usual cloud "convenience" yadda yadda.

Maybe I'll even chance upon the actual Kindle device itself someday... but hardly a biggie if not. It'll need to be recharged, I'll have to learn the UI all over again, etc. And it'll no doubt present much screen heartache and/or misery for not being able to connect to Amazon again, for needing to update itself, and all manner of other non-reading.

Just shoot me with a pixel gun now....

Couldn't tell for sure if you were being facetious, there, but oddly enough I suspect getting lost in actually reading probably cures such appearances-sakes-centric concern.

~starbreaker wrote (thread):

One of the reasons I like having physical bookshelves is that printed books are the original ROM (read-only memory). Once printed, they can't be altered save by printing a new edition that readers who prefer the older edition are free to ignore. The only way to see what I'm reading when I read a paper book is to look over my shoulder -- which is a good way to get punched in the face if we aren't close.

Bookshelves are also good places for Smudge to perch when he wants to watch over me like a guardian beast.

Some of my paper books also hold important memories. For example, I've got an edition of Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot that I bought from a street vendor overlooking the Seine in Paris back in 2017. I had also bought a French translation of Philip K. Dick's Ubik in a shrink-wrapped paperback. I had managed to dredge up enough high school French to hold a halting conversation with the vendor; her English was even worse than my French but we managed.

~ew wrote (thread):

Hey ~tetris, a bookshelf is "something" for sure! Not so much now, but in the past I have scanned the bookshelf of other people and found intriguing stuff indeed. My bookshelf has become somewhat of a burden now, so I freely give stuff away.

That being said, a long time ago (before 1997) I had the opportunity to hold an original edition of Newtons "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" (1687 says wikipedia) in my hands. That was a magic moment. I could even read some (my Latin is now dead), and grasp what the text was about. The other book was an introduction to geometry (by someone else), going like "A point is a nothing, a line is made up from adjacent points of nothingness ..." or something such. In Latin. And it was still readable after a few hundred years. The half dozen or so books we looked at in the university library were all in excellent shape. Really magic. So I think, printed books are sort of sacred. Maybe not each and every book, but in principle ...