A couple of weeks ago, flush with a paycheck from my part-time minimum wage job, and ignoring the valid and reasonable debts that I have, I decided to take the plunge and spend the 25USD to get become a lifetime member on LibraryThing.
I can't even tell you how pleased I am about this decision. Cuz here's the thing: I read a lot of books. A Lot of Books. Wait a minute, I need to back up a bit.
I have a library of just over 225 books in my office. It is small, and it is growing. A few years ago I decided that I would go to Portugal and so began to weed my life, including my library. I think that I ended up getting rid of about 3/5 of it, maybe more. That was before my appendix burst in August of 2007, I stayed in Lincoln, and by the spring of 2009 my library was 182 books precisely. I had room for every single book on a book shelf, standing vertically. Never let it be said that I have always been in need of new bookshelves. There has been a moment in time when it all fit.
I kept trading books in and out for about a year. In fact, I went 6 months or so without buying books (I even stopped grabbing books from the free book boxes outside of A Novel Idea (those are so damned dangerous)) at all. It was awful. But a growth experience. I am not really fond of miserable growth experiences, and suspect I will not decide to inflict them on myself in future. All that said, I don't have room for all of my books. I work in a used book shop. I get a good deal on them. And I love to read. Also, I am very curious about the look of my library - not the physical set up or the visual aspect of the spines, etc., but the subjects and the range of authors and the quality of the books. By quality I refer to something more subjective than outward monetary value.
There are titles of which I have two copies; one of them a paperback and much written in by me, and the other hardbound with a dust-jacket and relatively pristine. Some books are more comfortable in the pocket of my cargo pants, and some hold up a backpack with ease. There are some titles I love that I never have on hand because I buy cheap paperbacks of them in order to give them away because I think they ought to be read by as many people as possible. I love the size of Loeb Classical Library and Everyman Library books. I love the thin thin pages of collections of Shakespeare and Milton. I love the smell of my father's old textbooks and the trade publications of Freakangels. If a book possesses some such quality that appeals to me and will draw me to it in the future, it is likely to be something that will do well in my library. I might even read it.
Because I do have to be drawn back to my own books again and again and again. I love libraries. I use them, I revel in them, I want to spend the rest of my life working in and around and for and about them. So I tend to use university and public libraries more than I use my own. Which means that in order to be drawn back, there must be something on my shelves that cannot be replaced by someone else's.
I tend to prefer following paths that are known to me and the exercise of cataloging my books online is how I choose to become ever more familiar with these breathing bits of other people's lives and works that define such a large part of this space. I had long wanted to just get the lifetime account, but put it off and off and off until finally I could not justify having rated more than 1000 movies on Netflix, and only 168 on LibraryThing.
Next time: Thoughts on writing reviews (because you know I can talk).
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