Re: Book Hoarding
 

For you to re-read when you get old, and current books are of less interest.

Joyless
 

In my early twenties, I had the notion of assembling my own "library."
Classics, art books, histories, reference works, etc ...
What one would see in movies set in the stately manor.
Folly, what with the public library, and later internet.
Still I did buy, and continue to buy, books that beckoned.

Behavior I find puzzling, I am now witnessing in my supposedly rational female friends and relatives.
There is an almost manic craze for tidying, jettisoning possessions that no longer "spark joy."
Decluttering.
For so many, that means clearing the bookshelves to a Zen-like state.
Many, I have had to plead with - "Don't throw the books out in the trash! Donate to your library, give to a retirement home, drop off at the Salvation Army."
Someone will value those castoffs.
This is the polar opposite of hoarding, and it saddens me.
I wonder how many will regret their actions in a couple of years.

Re: Joyless
 

I doubt they will regret it since minimalism is in fashion right now. It's a pain to move or get rid of physical books. Many like the idea that they have millions of books at their disposal, and they only have to push the download button to read one. I would switch to reading on the tablet or kindle if not for my issues of decreased reading speed and increased impatience. Also people don't often steal books, but they will steal those devices.

Re: Book Hoarding
 

Minimalism is a fascinating idea that I did look into at one point. But I simply cannot be a minimalist when it comes to books. Everything else, yes. In fact, give me a bed, a comfortable chair, a CD player, and walls crammed with books and I think I'd be perfectly content.

Re: Book Hoarding
 

Obituary of Madeline Kripke (sister of the philosopher Saul Kripke), "who kept one of the world’s largest private collection of dictionaries [20,000 volumes], much of it crammed into her Greenwich Village apartment." Follow the link and scroll down to see an amazing picture of her apartment:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/n...ronavirus.html

This was not mindless collecting:

And here is a longer profile/interview with more pictures of her collection: https://narratively.com/the-dame-of-dictionaries/

And I can't resist adding this:

Re: Book Hoarding
 

I was looking at my written wishlists and adding the most important things to amazon wishlist again and I thought "I need to take a break before I enter the rest, maybe I'll spread this over the next two days"!

But I'm buying less books.

A couple of weeks ago I looked through all my books to get the priority books established. There's still some comics that I have no idea if I still want to read them and I don't want to get rid of them until I'm sure.

Some stuff I regret buying: Russell Kirk's Ancestral Shadows (I thought the one story I've read is just okay) and Oliver Onions (I've liked 2 or 3 of his stories well enough, but do I need this huge book of them?) But I won't get rid of them unless I'm really not enjoying them if I ever get around to them.

Re: Book Hoarding
 

When I look at authors I'm particularly interested in, I often say to myself "I'll read all their books eventually", but this is looking increasingly optimistic and unreal. So too that idea of keeping up with the small presses I'm most interested in.

How many authors do you manage, try to or realistically plan to read their complete works? Is it folly for a regular reader to try to be completist about many authors who written 50-100 books?

I'm still keen on being completist about SP Somtow and Tanith Lee.

Does any of you keep up with many fiction magazines online and offline?

Re: Book Hoarding
 

I have had a few temporary insanity episodes I pared down my book collection a bit too much. Where, for example, I brought 2 big bags to the library to donate, when, had I been more discerning, I should have just brought one small one. Of course, I don't regret all of these (letting go of mass market paperbacks never bothers me, and I do prefer to get rid of books that I have strong feelings against for whatever reason, like Sartre's "Nausea".), but there are a few that strike me as sheer madness in retrospect. I actually donated a first edition set of Thomas Mann's multi-volume "Joseph and His Brothers" (Which had a beautiful personalized dedication in exquisite calligraphy), simply because I had just purchased James Wood's more recent translation. Yet how much I've regretted that ever since!

Still, it is kind of funny. I only know perhaps one person in the real world with even a vague appreciation for books and literature. So I read pretty much for myself alone. There's nothing wrong with that, and it's even a noble thing in it's way. But it would be nice to have someone to discuss it all with on occasion. However, the ignorance of the average American today is pretty staggering. I saw a survey not so long ago that detailed how 30 percent of American adults actually think that the sun revolves around the earth rather than vice versa! (Really, how is this even possible? How can a person live so incuriously for 45 years as to not know such a basic fact of existence?) A similar survey showed that less than 5 percent of the adult population in this country reads a single book a year after college, even when "book" is defined so generously as to include Oprah Winfrey's list of top cookbooks. When these are your neighbors (70 million of whom voted for Trump, good grief.), I guess it's to be expected that literature and book collecting will always remain solitary pursuits.

Re: Book Hoarding
 

Pan Michael you have no idea HOW MUCH I empathize with what you wrote. It's like existing in a world filled with silence. It's beautiful and terrible simultaneously.

Re: Book Hoarding
 

If one were to select a country to live in based on what its readers are like, you might consider some of these statistics (but some of these articles are getting a bit old). Literacy rates and number of enthusiastic readers being a very different thing, especially with Thailand.
Finland ranked world's most literate nation | Books | The Guardian
Which Countries Read the Most? - WorldAtlas
BBC NEWS | South Asia | Indians 'world's biggest readers'

I had heard Australia was a good country of readers, but that was Terry Dowling saying that in the 90s.