Return of the Library

 After some months in my new apartment I built a veritable mountain of shelves by stacking them, level by level, in the middle of the living room (that being about the only place to put them).  Individually, the plastic shelves often collapse under my weight demands, but these have been tied together at strategic points so that they mutually support one another.  If their structural integrity finally fails, they fall together.

 I also started writing up little accession cards for my many books, on 3"x5" cards, one per volume.  Come on, who hasn't always dreamed of doing that?  Let's see a show of hands!

 . . . I don't see anything.  Well, I'm doing it, and slipping each book onto the shelves when its card is finished.  There are over 300 arrayed on the Mountain already, with more to come!

 I wonder:  Suppose I had to create an actual, real public library, volume by volume?  What would I acquire, and in what order?  Could I balance my personal desires with a more legitimate collection (what an actual library might order)?  Every day new books take their places on my tower of shelves.  Perhaps I might even read them, someday, but I'm getting ahead of myself.  Let’s see:

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Nichols, Wendalyn R., et al.  Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (New York: Random House, 2001).  First book out into the light of day.  As Hawkeye Pierce said on M*A*S*H, it has all the other books in it.  I wanted an update of the same dictionary I bought for college, but that’s out of print.  This comes close, however, and it lists interesting etymological details for most of its 207,000 words.

Roget, Peter Mark, et al.  Roget’s International Thesaurus, Fourth Edition (Revised by Robert L. Chapman).  (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1984).  In some ways the thesaurus is more useful than the dictionary.  It’s more fun to peruse, too.  I recall an old Peanuts comic where Sally Brown writes a story about cavemen being attacked by a bloodthirsty thesaurus.  I redrew that comic myself as a kid – and I had no idea what a thesaurus was at the time.  (I think one actually appears in Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings.)  Well, okay, this is getting silly, frivolous, ridiculous, goofy . . .

Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version.  (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).  Any glance over the works waiting their turn to pop out reveals that the Bible is the most important influence on Western civilization:  Dante, Milton, St. Augustine, any philosophy, poetry, history, legend.  As John Kieran writes in his treatise Books I Love, "It is not only a great book but a begetter of countless other books.  It has been published in various versions and many languages.  It has inspired authors down the ages and quotations from it have furnished titles for thousands of completely unrelated books in the different realms of literature.  It is part of our background in history and a cornerstone of our common culture."  This copy was presented to me in Sunday school back in 1969; it still has my scribbled notes in the front.

Shakespeare, William (edited by David Bevington).  Complete Works of Shakespeare, Third Edition (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1980).  What can you say about the Bard?  This is my college textbook, containing not only all the plays and sonnets but also full of biographical notes, glosses, criticisms and even political and cosmological ideas of Shakespeare’s time.  There are even some mimeographed handouts in it, left therein before hence by some rustic clown, by my troth!