Tidying up the other day I noticed some odd groupings on my bookshelves. Just to cite a couple of examples:
Bottom shelf “F105 Thunderchief in action” sandwiched between a Bidget Riley* book and an illustrated program to a Cathy de Monchaux exhibtion. These books do not belong together. In a library they’d be at opposite ends of the building, not nestling next to each other on the same shelf.
Top shelf Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (The Friendly Ones as it happens) sitting next to sheet music for George Formby’s “When I’m Cleaning Windows”.
Come on guys what’s on your bookshelves keeping weird company?
You mean like those? (left to right, german unless noted otherwise)
Selected Poems of Publius Ovidius Naso (in latin of course, 1894 edition)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (englisch)
…
The C++ Programming Language
The Bible
…
The Brothers Karamasoff I & II
The Nostradamus Code (hey, I was 14 when I got that one)
…
Parzival (middle high german/new high german bilingual edition)
Functional Programming
A coincidence: My C++ books are stacked with a Bible, but there’s a perfectly logical reason for it. They’re all heavy books and they keep the sub-bass unit in place.
I’m a non-believer and I don’t use C++ so this is about as useful as these books can be for me.
I just realized that I have a trashy romance novel (The Lady and the Outlaw by Joyce Brandon, for those who are interested, an old school bodice ripper: now with more rippling pectorals!) next to Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York by Kathy Peiss, which is basically about how allowing immigrant/first generation women to work granted them more freedom than they had ever had before and allowed them to invade male spheres such bars, without suffering social consequences.
Pioneer Days in Weyburn (a commemorative pamphlet from my home town in Saskatchewan) Journal of the Herbalist of Erdendorf by Howard H. Hirschhorn (herbal medicine and hiking in Bavaria) Mutiny - The Floating Republic by Manwaring and Dobree (Spithead and the Nore in 1797, of course) Perelman’s Home Companion (humourous short pieces) Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers by Martin Gardner (recreational math) Winnie ille Pu by A. A. Milne, translated by Alexander Lenard (a Latin classic)
The scary thing is that I could have picked at random and found a similar mix just about anywhere.
Eamon DeValera, by Tim Pat Coogan
The Joys of Yiddish
Prick Up Your Ears, John Lahr (about 60’s playwright Joe Orton and partner Ken Halliwell)
Lanark, Alasdair Grey. (think Kurt Vonnegut. Think Glasgow. Riiiiiiiight.)
Skywriting by Word of Mouth, John Lennon
Toilers of the Sea, Victor Hugo
Not too eccentric. I’m always rather heavy on the Irish and the Jewish. The Scottish is a new development.
