That’s EXACTLY what I was thinking of as I typed “Barnaby Rudge”!
(well, that and “A Sale of Two Titties”…)
I swear, after a lifetime of The Goon Show, Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python, Your Show of Shows, Little Britain, Bob and Ray, Firesign Theater, John Finnemore, etc etc…, there’s little I can think of without my mind going first to the parody.
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eta: Some of my favorite books have stupid and/or ugly dust jackets, so I make my own, with more creative titles. Some of which are from that sketch linked above.
I didn’t have my database up when I arranged them this way. I had index cards for all my books, not as simple to search through.
I have over 80 Ace Doubles, arranged separately by price (the letter code) and number. I own an Ace Books checklist I think I got from Dick Witter but I haven’t constructed a want list yet.
That would have been a good place to fill in my collection of DAW books. My want list for them is on a sheet of graph paper, one space per book, which I fill in with pencil when I buy it.
My old town had a glass-topped table, where the base was Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. If someone wanted a book, they would take the top off and give them the book, in exchange for a donation to the library. More recently, a now-defunct “artist’s colony” in my city had, for a while, a decoration called “River of Books”, which consisted of books hung from exposed pipes in the ceiling. Again, books could be purchased for a donation to the colony. They must have had, among other things, 50 copies of “The DaVinci Code.”
I met an actual book hoarder once and I can assure you, it’s still hoarding. This man had books in every room of his house, shelving on every wall in the house including shelving over the door frames, and books were piled everywhere. It was overwhelming.
This is a man who couldn’t get rid of an egg he accidentally dropped on the floor, much less a book.
I have more of a minimalist aesthetic. Particularly with having ADHD, the fewer items in my house, the better, so Kindle suits me well.
Oh, I agree too many books can certainly be hoarding, with piles that are truly dangerous if they topple on the occupant. It’s a joke shirt I wore on my trip to the library today, and it got smiles and chuckles from the staff.
That is just such a reductio ad absurdum. Sure you could argue that nothing is written without an agenda, but the agenda in untold cases is: “I want to tell people what I know about this subject so they can improve their game (of whatever type) like I did.”
Of course authors want to sell well and get lots of money for their effort, but that doesn’t happen without the book offering value to the readers / buyers. The best work gets promoted and elevated to the status of a classic, not the money-grabbing con efforts.
I have “improved my game” time and again by reading a book on a subject and applying the new information to my projects. Books are in effect free, when you factor in their usefulness in increasing your knowledge, understanding, efficiency and level of performance; 20 bucks for 200 hours of saved time on unfruitful experimentation etc. I’m intentionally vague since this applies to most any subject on the planet.
The internet is shallow and repetitive; someone reada book, wrote about the content online, and then it got repeated a thousand times over a thousand sites. When you want to get to the bottom of many things, you just need to grab a book that goes deep into specifics, in a coherent, well-written, multi-hundred page work. 20 pages with plenty of pics just doesn’t cut it, and most online content isn’t near even that level.
Looking at my 98% non-fiction bookshelves covering two walls of my living room, I’m reminded of the rewards they gave me, and also of the untold worlds they still contain, waiting for my exploration. They improve my life, just by being there.
by no end, frequenting the var. Volvo boards … there is way more information available concerning typical defects for the S40 gen1 car than in any book …
same for “critique my stand/movement while firing a recurve bow . based on this vid”…
same for solar projects … most books I found were of a certain vintage and have no chance to report on new hardware (and there’s a lot of new HW in PV).
Books in innovative areas are a non-starter as they are frozen in time (while life moves on - ever faster and makes them quite obslolete).
Which book would you recommend for flashing a LinageOS on a Samsung S20FE? If I want info on that I go to places on the internet and find literally 100s of posts on that with lots of multimedia links, etc… … which book will tell me about the Ukraine’s counterattack on Tokman?
sorry, but the concept of the internet being shallow is not true - you need to know where to look - if anything, I am constantly amazed of the depth of stuff I find there -
and I am fairly sure, that people who will write books on the UKR war, will goto https://www.understandingwar.org (and their 20.000+ footnotes and links) for their “research”
Shallow is a relative term. One can advance by leaps and bounds by relying on online resources. Many people use nothing else. But I have literally hundreds of non-fiction books and articles (including on archery!) that contain valuable insights, experimental results, data and knowledge that is nowhere to be found online.
I have groundbreaking studies on esoteric subjects on paper publications that I know have been partially regurgitated online and then copied ad infinitum, and that’s it. Others have no trace online, outside maybe library search engines showing the title and author, and we are talking about seminal stuff here.
It would be lovely to just go online and get the data one needs. But I have to hunt high and low for certain books and papers to get where I want. The internet at best, gives leads to these gems. Others I would never have found hadn’t I spent time browsing through the shelves of university libraries. Much of the stuff that was created before the internet simply doesn’t exist there. Any academic person knows this is the case.
People who don’t read books often think the internet has it all, but it’s simply not true. Millions of man hours of briliant, useful stuff has not been digitized and never will.
It is just silly to use the war in Ukraine as an example of how you can find all you need online. It’s a 2020’s event, for crying out loud.
don’t get me wrong - i don’t object the form-factor of a “book” to transfer knowledge or entertain, but the holier-than-thou attitude runs thick in this thread.
let’s not put that 300g of dead tree on a pedestal and pretend people buying them are educated and people who don’t, aren’t …
I am fairly sure, by 2030 you will have a lot of books on the UKR war … which goes to show the limitation of this specific format of knowledge transfer.
I started hanging onto mysteries and science fiction books once I realized that 1.) most libraries didn’t have huge collections of them and b.) A lot of them never get reprinted (or stop being reprinted after a while).
That’s true of other genres as well (try finding a lot of westerns or romances after the initial printing), but I’m not all that interested in other ones.
Yeah, my wife and I keep about a dozen coffee table type books, and some other reading material that is very easy to access for guests. A lot of it is local history and such. And we have a Calvin and Hobbes.
You need both. It is definitely true that many books and journals have not made it online - I have some conference proceedings not yet digitzed, but they may contain information that is not yet true, or is never true. A 300 page technical book may get less critical review than a 10 page journal paper. I’ve done technical book reviews and paper reviews and I see the light scrutiny the science books my wife writes get.
I’ve researched subjects online where there were five versions of the same event, often duplicated, and you have to exercise critical thinking to figure out which versions make sense and which don’t. But it is easy to find five versions online, not so easy for books.
Some people think that if it is hardcovers it must be true. Not so.
