I certainly do. My library is even card catalogued. (by paperclipping a paper with the name of a borrower to the card, I can remember who has what.) What few fiction books I have are alphabetized (kept in shelves on the other side of the room). Non-fiction is grouped by category, subject, and then alphabetized.
My library is my pride and joy. Our basement is finished, and that is where I house my treasures. I have a sofa, and two comfy chairs, and my bookshelves lining the walls. I spend most of my time down there. My books are carefully cared for. I even have a humidity monitor downstairs to make sure they stay healthy.
Books are my passion. I literally spend more on books per month than I do on rent. By the time I am old, I’ll have a hell of a collection. (Only wish I had someone to leave it to.) It’s already huge. Soon, I’ll have to expand into a second room with more shelf space.
The only spanking I can ever remember recieving at the hands of my mother was for ripping a page from a book when I was a small child. She taught me a deep respect for books. I, too, would never break a book’s spine, or dog-ear its creamy, smooth pages. That is why magazines have those thousands of postcard inserts crammed within: for bookmarks!
My largest subject areas are history, sociology and science, but I try to have at least one book on every subject I can find. Because of the breadth of subjects in my library, people are always asking to borrow. I’m very selective with who is allowed. When I go over to someone’s house, I always snoop around their bookshelves to check the condition of their books. If they’re battered, I think twice about loaning to them. (I once got a book back from a loan in which their dog had chewed on it. Didn’t even offer to replace it!) If they don’t HAVE any books, I’m especially wary.
I’m also suspicious of those people who have matching books, or large shelves of leather-bound editons that crackle when opened. It strikes me that they want to appear smart or well-read, but I know they’ll never read that edition of the collected works of Edgar Allen Poe. I’d never buy a book “Just for show.” Part of the beauty of a library is its diversity of sizes, colors, and cover materials.
You know what’s really sad? When I walk by some people’s homes and notice there’s not a single book on their bookshelves. I’d like to think there are other bookshelves in their home and those have a few books, but I doubt it. Me, I’ve packed my shelves as full as they’ll go and still must have a few hundred in storage.
One of my biggest regrets is giving away most of my books from my teenage years, I can still remember there being seven hundred and twenty three books that I packed up and sent to my cousin’s. Now I sell back only those books I actively disliked. Better safe than sorry.
This year, my only resolution is to not loan any more books. If there’s some cool book I think a friend will enjoy, I will be strong. I will reccommend the book to them and encourage them to buy it. I will not loan them a copy because it makes me like my friends less when they don’t return them.
Books are my precioussss, I keep them out of direct light, uncreased, unstained, cool, dryish and very happy. Oh yeah, I’m Amazon.com’s bitch, I am.
I recently had to move very quickly in the middle of a bad situation. I’d been expecting to move in a few months, and one of the jobs I had to do was to sort through my books. I have duplicate copies of some because I couldn’t find the ones I already own. I have books that I’ve never LIKED but somehow acquired and have had for so long that I haven’t been able to bring myself to dump them. I have books that I know aren’t mine but I’ve had for years anyway.
I had a one-bedroom apartment, and under the bed I’d shoved hardbacks. Lots of them. There was no room for anything else under there – it was solid books. And I had PILES of them around the bedroom. What’s more, I hate having people mess with them. I had to practically start throwing them at my brother to convince him to stop looking at them and just shove them in the damn boxes.
We Goodwilled most of my furniture, aside from my inadequate bookcases and my bed. 95% of the rest was my books. They’re sitting in storage at the moment, unsorted. I may not have much, but I have books coming out the wazoo.
This is my mother’s fault. I’m a THIRD-GENERATION bookworm. Ack!
It’s not possible to throw away a book. If for some reason I decide I don’t want a book (kinda rare, but it sometimes happens) I’ll just drop it into the box at the local library for returns… It’ll just end up in the library shelves or at one of their booksales they have a couple times a year. And no I don’t dump 30 books or something like that for them to sort through… just an occasional book.
Likewise in Kissing Jessica Stein. Not crammed full, but therewe lots of books all over the place. Part of the reason I liked that movie so much was pecause of the books in the apartment.
Recomended reading for everyone who’s posted here so far: Ex Libris; Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman. A nice little collection of exxays about being a bibliophile. (sp?)
I am a rampant lender of books. Friends of mine will come over and will load them up with books ‘I really think you’d like’. None of them are sf/fantasy fans, alas, which cuts well over half of my book collection.
Books, books. books. I love books. There is more in them than ever was or will be. Everything in the world and in people’s minds is in books.
Books come cheap. Second hand bookstores, library sales (AND you are doing a good deed) and the ever present thrift store. And don’t forget ebay. With $100 you can buy a bunch of books.
Don’t ever throw them away. On bad days, you can read a new one, or re-read a favorite.
I would never throw a book away, unless I had read it to shreds, but I do have some that need to go to a used book store. Guess I’ll have to find one around here.
Virtually all of my friends have thought it weird that I read while brushing my teeth. But what else am I supposed to DO while I do that? Is it weird?
I had to throw some books away…once…last year. It was really hard to do, almost like a sin. It was a set of encyclopedias from the '70s, that my SO had bought in when he was in college. He had kept them in a storage facility and they had gotten very moldy. Most of the pages wouldn’t open, and they were unreadable. I almost cried when we threw them in the dumpster, it felt so wrong. I saved the index volume, it has cool maps and wasn’t badly damaged.
Otherwise, I never ever throw books out, or sell them, or give them away. They are mine, and I don’t care if I don’t plan on reading it again, it is mine. Maybe someday I’ll want to read it again. My SO is also a reader (mostly fantasy) and he is really bad - he has multiple copies of his favorites, sometimes two copies of the same book in hardcover.
I used to keep clothes in my armoire, now it is full of books. The clothes get donated, the books stay.
I love books, I wish I had more, and more bookshelves.
I’m not terribly neurotic - I prefer paperbacks to hardbacks as they’re more portable & I don’t feel as badly if they get food or toothpaste (me too, whiterabbit!) on them or I dogear the page cause I can’t find anything for a bookmark.
I keep the dustjackets on hardbacks for bookmark purposes as well.
Have 3 5-shelf and 1 3-shelf bookshelf full to bursting (non-fiction & fiction separate, if you please) and several milk crates waiting for another bookshelf. No database… yet…
I have done the occasional mini-purge (awfully hard, tho!) and given stuff away in swaps & loans to family.
Obviously you read while brushing your teeth! What else are you going to do, look at yourself in the mirror? Why waste three minutes not reading. (And I’m serious here, btw.)
I assume everyone else takes books, lots of books, on trips. I usually bring enough on a 2 day trip to last if I get snowed in for a week. Just in case. Once I ran out and had to go to a mall to get some - there are never any really decent books in airport bookstores, though they are getting better.
I figure people who don’t read on planes (unless they are actually working on their computers) must be somewhat defective.
At one point I had all my pbs arranged by publisher, then by publisher’s number under that. It looked very cool, since you could see how the styles of artwork changed over time.
The only problem was that I had to go to my card file to find anything, so I changed them back. Maybe I’ll resort them when I have my database finished, but resorting is a several day process.
The only time I don’t read on planes is if I’m asleep. My general rule of thumb for books on trips is take no less than 400 pages/day with you, preferably more.
When we were on vacation over Christmas, we went in a bunch of antique stores. I kept seeing those old wooden card catalogue files from libraries that had been refinished. They had been stripped and re-stained, and the hardware nicely polished.
I WANTED ONE!
They reminded me of apothecary tables with all the neat little drawers just waiting for treasures. I wouldn’t have necessarily even have used it to catalogue my books (I don’t have THAT many books!), but it would have been so cool just to have one.