A lament for the bookshelf by Russell Smith
I have just read one of the most thoughtful posts on books and the state of books (even tangentially, book collecting - thus I am including it here...). I hope you will enjoy it. We have Russell Smith of The Globe and Mail to thank for the following:
Russell Smith: On Cultures 3/04/2010 in The Globe and Mail
In the future, our books will be invisible, like our music, but we’ll be the poorer for it. Here’s why
In the age of the e-book, what will happen to bookshelves? How will we decorate our apartments? How will we judge our prospective partners?
I am living in the aftermath of a move, where as usual the books have been the most obstructive and expensive and dustiest element. They have been moved from student room to disastrous relationship to shared house to storage locker for 20 years now, and they have not suffered, indeed they have proliferated as they migrated, like a great nomadic herd. Many of them have traversed this vast country more than once; some have crossed an ocean. My books thrive on upheaval: It causes them to spawn.
Before every move, I perform a heartbreaking yet necessary cull. I isolate the weakest – the review copies of self-help books, the self-published novels sent to me with challenging notes, the anthologies compiled for noble charities – and I drive them to a local library or Goodwill with a guilty feeling. (Fiction is more likely to survive this cull than non-fiction, because it is less topical: All the books I bought in the nineties on “computer culture” are uninteresting except to a specialist in failed prognostications. But a novel from the nineties with a computer in it is fascinating.)
And still on every move there are 10 more boxes than there were before, and new Ikea shelves to be assembled and found space for. When I am grown up, I will have a carpenter build me bookcases of actual wood, but by then there will be no more books.
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