Excellent Ruth and Peco. A home library is such an important resource. I have an extensive collection of nature field guides which I love looking through and marvelling at the contents of. There are species I would never have heard of if it wasn't for these books, and the ability to identify obscure dragonflies, moths, birds, and flowers that I see is invaluable (this information is really hard to access on the internet for some species groups).
Reading information in books also adds worth/value to that knowledge. When my father was young, if he wanted to find out something about Japanese history, he would have to cycle to the local library, find the book, find the part he wanted to read, and then take notes. You can be sure he valued and treasured such knowledge considering how much effort it took him to obtain. And the memory of the process of obtaining the information helped him remember the information he gleaned.
Conversely, we live in a world of inform action overload - cheap, easy to access information that we often forget the same day that we read it. I know this experience all too well in my own life. I am much more likely to remember something I read on a paper page than on a screen.
I'm a published novelist, and recently I had a conversation with three separate (as yet unpublished) writers finishing up their first novels and really struggling. I asked them how many books they read a month. All three hadn't read a novel yet this year. I admit to losing my cool and saying it's lunacy to expect to produce a high quality, publishable novel, without reading widely and nigh compulsively.
I don't know if it's arrogance or laziness or just the result of the things you often write about: a brain consumed my 'the machine.'
Thanks for the info on libraries throwing out books. What a policy. It is like a bank throwing away money because nobody took it out...well maybe they do do that?
Losing books and words before I've even found them has bothered me for years. I have an old book published in 1973 about raising backyard dairy goats. In this book are many methods, knowledge, solutions that are not discoverable in the internet sources.
I've noticed that modern books such as one I picked up at the library about the Enneagram are written by some chick who did a google search or maybe threw it together over the weekend with grammarly. Cook books are similar. They feel like they are written by template or computer.
You are so right about the language used in old children's books. As I wrote in my own newsletter (https://terryfreedman.substack.com/i/142908904/just-william) I recently picked up some copies of books I used to enjoy as a child, and I was struck by how adult the language is: words like histrionics, Pegasean, and many others. I cannot imagine that sort of linguistic richness appearing in modern children's books.
In my opinion, another reason for acquiring older editions of books, and physical ones rather than digital ones (I'm thinking of KIndle) is that they are less likely to have been bowdlerised because of someone's view that the book needs updating for the 21st century.
Building your book monastery -- what a beautiful way to look at your home library. Unplug from machines, retreat to your monastery, feed your soul. Thanks for this thoughtful post, Ruth and Peco.
Marvellous. I have the same paperback edition of Lord of the Rings as pictured here. I have scheduled a read of volume 3 after Easter. I bought the full set of CS Lewis' Narnia stories after Christmas. I hadn't read them since my early teens (which was, shall we say, quite some time ago) and thoroughly enjoyed them. My mother has now borrowed them to read herself! Some books, like Tolkien, you can read again and again. Others I get bored with. I loved Jane Austen but haven't wanted to read them in years. Maybe one day. I, too, have a passion for old books and love the inscriptions. I wish you well with your rescue efforts!
I've found some amazing totally forgotten classics from the Pulitzer Prize Fiction Winners from the 1920's and 1930's. In the book "Laughing Boy," I learned about Navajo's assimilation into European Settler culture in the 1920's as their own culture vanishes. Given it was written so long ago, it seemed pretty authentic. The book "So Big" taught me about farming on the plains and the introduction of asparagus to the American diet through a story about a mother/son relationship. Nobody talks about these books but they're real gems - written with much thought, back when people used a richer language than we use today. Many are out of print but available on thriftbooks for cheap, or through inter-library loan.
We live in a Golden Age of book collecting, due to reasons like libraries getting rid of wonderful books to make room for the new, as well as the plethora of garage/estate sales where books of all sorts are available for a song. It truly is a great time to be a book lover!
The only time I feel any pangs over owning so many books is when we move. (We are currently in the process of moving.) So when we've packed countless boxes of books and they stack in towers everywhere, I wonder if we're a bit mad. My husband and I do cull our collection a bit here and there, removing books that no longer serve our family, but inevitably purchase more every year.
My books represent worlds off thought and imagination. I group books by the conversation that they are having with each other, in which I can join simply by seeing them. When I use my own mind, I place thoughts and questions and referents upon shelves, ready to take them down any time their participation would add to the work that I do. When a book sits beside another, they are speaking. So I have near to each other Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi, Avicenna, and then Tolkien and Beagle! ... Or also, Galeano, Kapuscinski, Nasdiij, and Arundhati Roy. Every day that my dear friends lay in boxes in my basement, I long for them, their good company, their spring of inspiration that will turn my mundane microcosm into an infinitely sublime chance to play simultaneously about the firmament.
Once as a new student I lost my way, entered the wrong courtyard, and then further, the wrong room. Upon seeing an attractive shelf of books, I began to read their spines, growing in excitement, before I realized that I had intruded upon the privacy of some delightful person unknown. Ashamed to be possibly found in this private sanctuary without invitation, I shook off the enchantment and fled, hoping not to be noticed. Now, I mourn the loss of that possible friend, and wish that I had been found, even forced myself to be so discovered. Surely a common scholarly enthusiasm would have assured our bond to be inviolable by that brief social transgression. I mourn the loss of the friends I have not met. Even, as I passed through neighborhoods, I look at the windows and imagine what if I were to have a singular literary x-ray vision, to see the books on the shelves. Then they would become for me my friends, my mentors, those with whom I could come to New understandings of the world. Just only then would remain for me the knocking upon the door, and the hopeful opening. I love my friends from other centuries and times, but I grieve more the yet living friends upon whose doors I have not dared knock.
This is wonderful. I have been thinking lately of the value of incorporating well-made and beautiful books. We have many paperbacks that aren’t that appealing to the senses, but sometimes that’s what’s available or what one can afford. I think it was Autumn Kern who, in a video, explained how she buys well-made beautiful books on the cheap by frequenting estate, library, and school sales, etc, too. I personally have been using Thrift Books for a while and really appreciate the selection and affordability!
Hello, used bookstore owner here! Our classics section is constantly diminished, not because we toss them out, but because people won't stop buying them, which I find massively encouraging in the face of all the bad news about declining literacy and books no longer being assigned in schools.
I've been keeping an eye on the growing list of comments on this post, and I just want to say how wonderful and endearing all of these comments are! There is nothing quite like a bunch of bookish people talking and reveling in the goodness of the printed word. It warms the heart!
"Never try to start an argument with a person whose TV is larger than his bookshelf." -anon
Excellent Ruth and Peco. A home library is such an important resource. I have an extensive collection of nature field guides which I love looking through and marvelling at the contents of. There are species I would never have heard of if it wasn't for these books, and the ability to identify obscure dragonflies, moths, birds, and flowers that I see is invaluable (this information is really hard to access on the internet for some species groups).
Reading information in books also adds worth/value to that knowledge. When my father was young, if he wanted to find out something about Japanese history, he would have to cycle to the local library, find the book, find the part he wanted to read, and then take notes. You can be sure he valued and treasured such knowledge considering how much effort it took him to obtain. And the memory of the process of obtaining the information helped him remember the information he gleaned.
Conversely, we live in a world of inform action overload - cheap, easy to access information that we often forget the same day that we read it. I know this experience all too well in my own life. I am much more likely to remember something I read on a paper page than on a screen.
I'm a published novelist, and recently I had a conversation with three separate (as yet unpublished) writers finishing up their first novels and really struggling. I asked them how many books they read a month. All three hadn't read a novel yet this year. I admit to losing my cool and saying it's lunacy to expect to produce a high quality, publishable novel, without reading widely and nigh compulsively.
I don't know if it's arrogance or laziness or just the result of the things you often write about: a brain consumed my 'the machine.'
Thanks for the info on libraries throwing out books. What a policy. It is like a bank throwing away money because nobody took it out...well maybe they do do that?
Losing books and words before I've even found them has bothered me for years. I have an old book published in 1973 about raising backyard dairy goats. In this book are many methods, knowledge, solutions that are not discoverable in the internet sources.
I've noticed that modern books such as one I picked up at the library about the Enneagram are written by some chick who did a google search or maybe threw it together over the weekend with grammarly. Cook books are similar. They feel like they are written by template or computer.
You are so right about the language used in old children's books. As I wrote in my own newsletter (https://terryfreedman.substack.com/i/142908904/just-william) I recently picked up some copies of books I used to enjoy as a child, and I was struck by how adult the language is: words like histrionics, Pegasean, and many others. I cannot imagine that sort of linguistic richness appearing in modern children's books.
In my opinion, another reason for acquiring older editions of books, and physical ones rather than digital ones (I'm thinking of KIndle) is that they are less likely to have been bowdlerised because of someone's view that the book needs updating for the 21st century.
Building your book monastery -- what a beautiful way to look at your home library. Unplug from machines, retreat to your monastery, feed your soul. Thanks for this thoughtful post, Ruth and Peco.
Marvellous. I have the same paperback edition of Lord of the Rings as pictured here. I have scheduled a read of volume 3 after Easter. I bought the full set of CS Lewis' Narnia stories after Christmas. I hadn't read them since my early teens (which was, shall we say, quite some time ago) and thoroughly enjoyed them. My mother has now borrowed them to read herself! Some books, like Tolkien, you can read again and again. Others I get bored with. I loved Jane Austen but haven't wanted to read them in years. Maybe one day. I, too, have a passion for old books and love the inscriptions. I wish you well with your rescue efforts!
I am glad to see that I am not alone in using A Canticle for Leibowitz as a field guide. Beautiful.
That and The Road. I am may be more on my own with this last one.
I've found some amazing totally forgotten classics from the Pulitzer Prize Fiction Winners from the 1920's and 1930's. In the book "Laughing Boy," I learned about Navajo's assimilation into European Settler culture in the 1920's as their own culture vanishes. Given it was written so long ago, it seemed pretty authentic. The book "So Big" taught me about farming on the plains and the introduction of asparagus to the American diet through a story about a mother/son relationship. Nobody talks about these books but they're real gems - written with much thought, back when people used a richer language than we use today. Many are out of print but available on thriftbooks for cheap, or through inter-library loan.
We live in a Golden Age of book collecting, due to reasons like libraries getting rid of wonderful books to make room for the new, as well as the plethora of garage/estate sales where books of all sorts are available for a song. It truly is a great time to be a book lover!
The only time I feel any pangs over owning so many books is when we move. (We are currently in the process of moving.) So when we've packed countless boxes of books and they stack in towers everywhere, I wonder if we're a bit mad. My husband and I do cull our collection a bit here and there, removing books that no longer serve our family, but inevitably purchase more every year.
My books represent worlds off thought and imagination. I group books by the conversation that they are having with each other, in which I can join simply by seeing them. When I use my own mind, I place thoughts and questions and referents upon shelves, ready to take them down any time their participation would add to the work that I do. When a book sits beside another, they are speaking. So I have near to each other Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi, Avicenna, and then Tolkien and Beagle! ... Or also, Galeano, Kapuscinski, Nasdiij, and Arundhati Roy. Every day that my dear friends lay in boxes in my basement, I long for them, their good company, their spring of inspiration that will turn my mundane microcosm into an infinitely sublime chance to play simultaneously about the firmament.
Once as a new student I lost my way, entered the wrong courtyard, and then further, the wrong room. Upon seeing an attractive shelf of books, I began to read their spines, growing in excitement, before I realized that I had intruded upon the privacy of some delightful person unknown. Ashamed to be possibly found in this private sanctuary without invitation, I shook off the enchantment and fled, hoping not to be noticed. Now, I mourn the loss of that possible friend, and wish that I had been found, even forced myself to be so discovered. Surely a common scholarly enthusiasm would have assured our bond to be inviolable by that brief social transgression. I mourn the loss of the friends I have not met. Even, as I passed through neighborhoods, I look at the windows and imagine what if I were to have a singular literary x-ray vision, to see the books on the shelves. Then they would become for me my friends, my mentors, those with whom I could come to New understandings of the world. Just only then would remain for me the knocking upon the door, and the hopeful opening. I love my friends from other centuries and times, but I grieve more the yet living friends upon whose doors I have not dared knock.
This is wonderful. I have been thinking lately of the value of incorporating well-made and beautiful books. We have many paperbacks that aren’t that appealing to the senses, but sometimes that’s what’s available or what one can afford. I think it was Autumn Kern who, in a video, explained how she buys well-made beautiful books on the cheap by frequenting estate, library, and school sales, etc, too. I personally have been using Thrift Books for a while and really appreciate the selection and affordability!
Book are an island of sanity in a world gone mad. We need more people anchored to the physical world and less people living in virtual universes.
Hello, used bookstore owner here! Our classics section is constantly diminished, not because we toss them out, but because people won't stop buying them, which I find massively encouraging in the face of all the bad news about declining literacy and books no longer being assigned in schools.
I've been keeping an eye on the growing list of comments on this post, and I just want to say how wonderful and endearing all of these comments are! There is nothing quite like a bunch of bookish people talking and reveling in the goodness of the printed word. It warms the heart!
What a pleasure to read. Thank you for your work