Re: Books Do Furnish A Room
Posted by:
Big John (---.rit.reuters.com)
Date: July 28, 2003 10:53AM
I've been streamlining my books down to prepare for moving to Bristol. Most of them are now in my old bedroom in the parents' house, or "Alexandria" as I like to call it. Panning round from left to right, that room contains:
- 1 small shelf of random paperbacks in the corner.
- No bookcase, 'cos I've had that away for Bristol.
- 3 boxes with books in them, recently shunted down from Exeter. Mostly science fiction, some SF lit-crit, and a stack of Chaosium Lovecraftian fiction books.
- 3 long shelves over an old chest of drawers. Bottom shelf almost entirely occupied by French language books, mostly Ionesco and Queneau. Middle shelf Russian language books and assorted academic texts. Top shelf anything large, hardbacked, large and hardbacked, and a few "wacko" books.
- A sort of wooden partitioned arrangement on top of a currently in-use chest of drawers, intended for CDs, videos, etc, but currently housing a lot of Agatha Christie (ripe for the culling...), PG Wodehouse, 'Far Side' collections, general literature and assorted SF books.
- A cupboard, used for general storage, that includes a double-stacked shelf of books I'll probably never read again, mostly kids/teen.
- A bookcase, 8 shelves, mostly filled up with 'Doctor Who' books - TV novelisations and spin-off novels. Only about a dozen or so of those novels are likely to last out the next few years. Remaining novels to be shifted on for trade some day. I'd hand on the novelisations to a good home, but in my youth I wrote my name in the front cover of each one. Spot the public school survivor. Some general literature on the bottom 2 shelves.
All told, well in excess of 1000 books (last count in 1998 put my entire stash of books at around 1200; I've bought more since then). In fairness, a few hundred of these could reasonably be sold on.
This leaves me with about 150 books in the Westcountry, being the books I looked at, thought about, and decided I was likely to reread more than once in the near future. My room looks strangely bare.
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"Whisky-wa-wa," I breathed - she was dressed as Biffo the Bear.