Dienstag, 19. Februar 2013

The Beginning of my Library

I would like to claim that I spent the day reorganising my bookshelves, but since my books have never been in any kind of order before that would be a complete and utter lie. Instead it would be more accurate to say that I laid the foundation of my own little library today.

Since I decided to start reading the classics in November 2011 more and more books have been accumulating in my already stuffed room. There has never been a plan behind my acquisitions: whatever catches my eye and is affordable usually ends up in my possession. So Dickens slowly joined Harry Potter and Tolstoy landed in a pile together with Twilight. The problem with this is obvious; there is no system and you never find what you are looking for (and the floor is covered in stacks of books to the point of my room being no longer traversible). Nonetheless I never felt like I had enough classics to give them a place of their own, after all I am still practically a novice to classic literature. Anyway, just out of curiousity I decided today to pile all my classics up and see if there are enough of them to give them their own shelf. Can you imagine my surprise when I realised that they do not only fill a shelf but a whole bookcase? That I have in fact enough classics to sort them by century?

The result of my work, sorted by century with the ancient Greeks on top left and the Modernists on the bottom right

To this day I have collected exactly 70 books by classic authors, some of which I loved, some which I did not like too much (I'm looking at you, Faust!) and some that I have yet to read. I know that those two shelves contain only a tiny percentage of world literature, but I have hope that this percentage will continue to grow at the same rate for many, many years to come. By then I will hopefully have moved into a giant manor with my books, otherwise I see no way to accommodate all of them!

6 Kommentare:

  1. Love the classics bookshelf! Buying classics is always fun due to the number of different covers and editions.
    And I'm going to need a giant manor house for all my books at some point too :P

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    1. For someone who is as bad at decision making as me the different editions sometimes are a real problem! I remember almost having a nervous breakdown when choosing a copy of Jane Eyre ;)

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  2. Realizing that one owns more books than one thought is such a happy discovery. I, too, dream of owning a large library. It's one of the only reasons I'd care for a manor: the books need an accommodating home. :)

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    1. Sigh...reading is such an expensive hobby: first the books and now the manor! We'll have to earn a loooot of money :)

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    2. haha, true. But considering how much reading we do, that's not very likely, is it?

      We could always marry for money like so many of the characters we read about. ;)

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  3. Beautiful library! I can definitely relate to the crowded bedroom floor, so I'm certainly glad to see that your classics have such a nice space of their own. :)

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