Bookshelves

A while back, PZ Myers posted a snapshot of one of his bookshelves and asked that others do the same, in a close-up so that he could actually pick out some titles. I finally got around to scanning one in. It's a pretty massive image, so I won't post it directly to the blog; instead, here it is. [EDIT, 7-17-04: I have removed the picture, because it was really big and took up lots of space.] The picture is of the top three shelves of the tall bookcase seen on the right-hand side of a pic in this earlier post of mine. (The larger version of the picture in that post is no longer available, by the way.)

Like Dr. Myers, I gravitate toward people's bookshelves whenever I'm in their home. In fact, my bookish nosiness goes farther than that: at The Store, if I see one of my coworkers reading a book while they're on lunch break, I will often barge in and ask them what they're reading. It's just a horrible quirk of mine. Sometimes I think I could provide color-commentary for shoppers at Borders:

"OK, folks, the man and his girlfriend have entered the Science Fiction and Fantasy section, and they're looking over the hardcovers first. The man reaches for a book -- look at the confident way he sticks his hand out there, he knows what he wants! -- ooooooh, he's looking at the newest Shannara book. Swing-and-a-miss! But what's this? The girlfriend has gone a little bit ahead of him, and she's looking at what looks like an Octavia Butler trade paperback...but she's holding her back to the boyfriend, like she doesn't want him to know what she's reading. The way he's grokking that Robert Jordan atlas, she probably doesn't have to worry....So let's turn our attention for a moment to that cute girl making capuccino in the cafe, just because we can...."

Recently the Wife and I attended a get-together at a local acquaintance's home. They live in a gorgeous new home, with something like 19000 square feet in their living room alone, eight TVs, six computers, two bedrooms for each kid, and a kitchen wherein Emeril Lagasse, Wolfgang Puck, and Mario Batali could each make a separate Thanksgiving dinner at the same time and never run into one another -- and not a single bookshelf. I mean, not one. There was no evidence anywhere in that entire house -- and we got the grand tour -- of the presence of a single, solitary scrap of reading material beyond the Sunday paper and the phone book. It was just incredibly weird, almost creepy.

To me, a house without books is little more than a collection of walls, and a crappy apartment filled with books is more homey than a palatial house with none.