Hah! I didn't even say the shelves have books on them! But they do, and
they're mostly for sale, 2,500 of them, and almost as many more waiting
to be listed. I have bought a lot of books over the years, and when I
moved in the 1990s, I found myself with a roomful, stacked to the
ceiling in boxes. So I gave a pickup truck full of them to Legal Aid of
Franklin County for a fund-raiser. At least I could see the windows from
the doorway.
I kept buying and kept giving them away, a trunkful every year to
the fund-raiser for the local history society museum my cousin ran,
boxes to my church's annual rummage sale. I considered setting
bookshelves in the bathtub of my unused second bathroom for storage.
When my husband died, in preparation for cronehood I started arguing
politics online and shocked myself by remarrying someone who needed
space for all the audio stuff he was moving from 800 miles away. He
suggested selling my excess books online, as he did with his audio
equipment to afford some old turntable he wanted more. So I did, and
it's an enjoyable hobby---although we did have to buy a bigger house
before long.
Now I acquire old books to sell, from auctions and yardsales and
mostly people giving me what they ran out of space for. I see myself as
"finding good homes for old books." Not that it makes a profit.
Of course, I have shelves around the fireplace and elsewhere for
books I won't part with, but I assume even Patrick has those.
And I won't mention that for the price of another device, I could buy a
lot of books. (And a lot of people elsewhere have reported breaking
their Kindles.)
Joy
who tweets new listings (mostly circa 1970 sociology trade paperbacks
lately) at JoyfulA
Patrick King wrote:
> Joy, with bookshelf-filled rooms
>
> **********************************
>
> First, your electronic library exists in cyberspace. Kindles, anyway, are very resilient pieces of equipment. But if you do manage to break it, or more likely, have it stolen, your library is not "on" the specific device. You simply acquire another device and link it to your cyberspace library (takes under a minute to accomplish)and go on reading.
>
> The more salient question is, what sane person wants to fill up their entire living space with books they're going to read five times in their lives and never look at again? What's the thing about possessing all this stuff and keeping it all around you? I've been divesting myself of 40 years of book collecting for the last 3 years. I'm down to 2 bookshelves full of things I really do refer to. Some of these I've already replaced with e-editions.
>
>
>
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