I got a request for a tour of my bookshelf, so for those who are interested, here is my home library.
I always wanted floor-to-ceiling books, so I put together these four bookshelves, inherited or collected one way or another, and I was lucky in that these two bookshelves on top happened to just perfectly line up with the bookshelves on the bottom, so somehow these four mismatched bookshelves come together to make this home library.
So the organization is a mix of genres and just the sizes of the books.
So as much as I would like to have whole sections where it’s nothing but one genre together, based on the book sizes, they are somewhat distributed around.
So here I will use this bamboo pole to point to my books.
Starting over here, we have ancient history, classical history, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, going into medieval history.
Then we have the war section, general war, going into modern wars.
Then we have politics, general political works.
And over here we have a bible dictionary, many thousands of pages.
Going down here, we have horror and fantasy, going into my children’s books, and then into travel.
Lots of travel books.
And then over here, adventure, pirates, and exploration.
Over on the next level, I have linguistics, history of linguistics, writing systems, then the English language in particular, then literary books, libraries, book design, journalism, books about writing, aphorisms.
And here we have my fiction section, so roughly chronological, going through ancient, classical writings, through medieval, and into modern books.
And over here we have theatrical, everything to do with plays, then we have ancient plays, and a whole bunch of Shakespeare, and then some modern plays.
Down here, at the bottom of my upper deck, I have my selection of books that I would like to read soon.
Here I have Sacred Geography, Time and the Art of Living.
Now going into mythology, and here I have some religious books, going into a collection of Chinese, Eastern religious books, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism.
Over here I have some practical books, like trails, sandcastles, backpacking, the Art of Travel, some more travel books.
And, oh, look at this: unsorted various sort of philosophical stuff.
There we go.
Philosophy we’ll call it.
Down here we have the oversize musical scores for piano.
I love my Bach and Beethoven especially.
Now down here, psychology, going into philosophy – oh, I’m going backwards now – through into ancient philosophy, then into some of the world’s religions, occultism, and here Judaism and Christianity, and into some Chinese scriptures.
And down here, at the lower levels, we have some music, scores and general music books, art.
Here we have some crime thrillers, going into law, business, medicine, geography, and astronomy.
Down to my Toronto collection, books about my hometown Toronto, genealogy, and math and puzzles.
Then over into a collection of sports, going into humour, and a pile of papers.
Down here we have a collection of oversize books here, some classics, oversized, some more religious books, role-playing games, children’s books, kind of a catch-all there.
And here we have history, oversize, with some Canadian history, going into anthropology, and then my anthropological linguistics, and throw in some pyramids and some adventure.
And then, not even fitting on the shelf, the overflow, we have the really big books that just will not fit, historical atlases, and some board games.
Most of these books I haven’t read yet, and many of them I probably never will.
But I love having them here as an opportunity that I might read them.
And even just looking at the side of each book, each book is like a possible world in itself, just sitting there.
It’s like it’s become part of the wall, but it’s like a living wall that, at any point, you can pull one brick out of that wall, and it becomes a whole world to itself.
So, in principle, I like to not have too many possessions, and there is a great lightness and a great advantage to be had by not having too many things.
But I have to say I am quite fond of this little corner of my room.