Calamity 2009

Accident Forces Major Shift for Library

One afternoon this summer as I sat at my computer, I heard off behind me and to my left what sounded like a ruffle as though some animal was rustling through wads of crumpled newsprint. I turned in time to see the wave of the library’s metal shelves in the major stack area topple one another from the outside wall to the inside door of the furnace room. For those moments, the tipping shelves seemed to domino in slow motion. But suddenly it was all over: about 8,000 volumes lay among the layered and twisted cascade.

Pat Sween and I built our house in the summer of 1992. We were still working and our two children had finished college in 1985 and 1988 and were at work away from home. Our daughter had married the year before. Though I had years left to work, I was looking for a building that would furnish library and office space after I quit employment and focused on reading and writing. Instead, we decided on a new home with space for all those things we wanted.

After some looking, we found a house plan that lent itself to our wishes. If we moved some of the components around and built a lower floor, it would suit just fine. We wanted a lot that sloped allowing a walkout from the lower level, and we found one on a steep, oak-filled corner, purchased when it was full of snow. When construction began, we quickly learned it did not slope exactly as envisioned, but some more dollars for excavation took care of the defects in our landscape choice.

Pat Sween spent her summer supervising the contractor and his crew, and by August 1, amazingly, we moved in even as the carpeting was been fixed in place.
I had done enough study, teaching, and some library administration to know what was ideal in library design and what was workable.

Besides two bedrooms with a bathroom between them on the south end of the lower level, two large areas comprise the library. The larger area at the foot of the stairs is 32 feet deep by 21 feet across. This is the office area housing clippings files and periodicals on the east behind storage cupboards that back up drawers and filing cabinets around the computer station that is opposite the work desk. A work table at the foot of the stairs doubles as a conference table and a couch and chairs welcome more casual conversation. Book stacks and display areas run along the longer parallel walls. The stack area is smaller at 23 feet deep by 11 feet wide. The opening between them, 3½ feet by 9 ½ feet, is the space between the under stairs closet and the furnace room wall. Additional shelves spill over into this space.

My previous library setup had used a number of metal shelves that migrated into the new place to accommodate storage in the furnace room. I found new inexpensive metal shelves at Pamida and after the initial purchase bought 25 more sets. When set up in six-shelf sections of four-section ranges, shelved on both sides, the library realized 672 linear feet of shelving. Though books are various widths, because many are paperback, mine average ten volumes per foot. The metal shelves would accommodate about 6,700 titles.

By July 2000, when I quit employment, these shelves were crammed and I needed more shelving. Thanks to a post-employment freelance contract, I used most of the income to purchase a second batch, this time more deluxe. From scouting around, I hit upon a sale at Unpainted Furniture and with my contract earnings bought 20 sturdy oak units of six shelves each, about half again as tall as the metal ones. These went against the outside walls of my space freeing the metal shelves to be realigned and moved closer together.

That center section of metal shelves carried all the language and literature – criticism, anthologies, and individual works – as well as most of U.S. history, the states, and the Americas, physical and cultural geography, social science, political science, and law. Law, mostly U.S. constitution and Bill of Rights matters is one of the smallest areas in the library.

By 2007, the shelves were full again despite stopgaps with shelves I built or bought for such items as general encyclopedias, language dictionaries, and the scores of picture books that helped amuse the younger grandchildren when they visited. I tried to slow my book buying by concentrating on the lists of the most essential books that I lacked and buying fewer on the discovery basis. Often I would see a book that illuminated one of my interests or contributed to a future project, and if the price was right, I would buy it. I had only minor success in resisting my own imagined future.

However, by resolving upon a steady state library, I began to routinely identify books to discard. Easy stuff went first – books I had read and would neither read nor consult again, dated books of unlikely reference value, areas no longer of former interest such as management and entrepreneurship. All told about 500 volumes fell to this axe.

With the collapse of most of the metal shelves, another reality hit. The tumbled stacks struck me as an archeological site collapsed by an earthquake so that I must excavate it to restore its former semblance of sense and order. I found only a handful of books actually damaged – four torn covers and one broken spine. However, most of sections had been skewed in some way so that fifteen shelves were warped beyond straightening and about twenty supporting rods could not be bent back into shape. Worse, the major damage was to the coupling pieces that held upper and lower rods together as one straight post.

My excavation took most of four weeks. Only seven sections could be used at full height. Though restoration required all sections to be taken apart and tightened in reassembly, the full height shelves stood up best against walls, placed necessarily against them in the direction they leaned. The rest went into half-height sections in ranges only nineteen inches apart to carry the remaining literary works of individual authors and anonymous titles.

With seven less stable sections against walls, confined to one-sided shelving, and the forgone top shelf to maintain alignment besides the loss of fifteen unusable shelves, no room remained for an estimated 1500 books. Such a number put new pressure on further rigorous withdrawals.

The calamity disheartened me, but realism beckoned and required me to slog at it in as unflinching a manner as could be mustered. Of necessity, my priorities came up for review. Then a bright spot emerged. Our oldest grandson about to enter his junior year in high school and a great reader said he wanted to build up his library and would be glad for anything I could give him from the discards. What he said made me think of the two other older grandchildren, and I began to cull for books matching the reading interests of the three at nine, thirteen, and sixteen years.

This time, I gave up on what I determined as more marginal works particularly in science fiction, foreign authors I would never get to, and less literary works. While I retained almost all of the U.S. titles, as well as those for Greece and Rome, I cut off many biographies and areas of specificity while retaining the more general histories. I became merciless in areas of interior design, home furnishing, and less attentive to specific technologies. I cut a whole section of biographies of actors and actresses, though film remains one of my favored entertainments, and decided I could live without a whole section of past yearbooks and almanacs, retaining only the most recent editions of current titles.

The process of de-accessioning titles is a cumbersome one, and most of the dumped books sleep in boxes to get them out of the way for later handling. Hundreds of titles still important to me remain, but I currently lack the shelves to accommodate them. These books went into sacks and boxes, stored in a closet and furnace room, much as I once had to keep part of my library off the shelf before we moved to this house. A byproduct of the space crunch is that I needed to shuffle backfiles of periodicals to handle shifted book locations. I am using a less than adequate shelf, a survivor from my attempts at carpentry in junior high. I had to recycle about five linear feet of past New Yorker magazines, clipping out and filing some of the more impressive stories and articles. Something had to go, and since I no longer subscribe, the axe fell there.

In all likelihood, we will be moving in a year or two for reasons of advancing age and the need to focus and manage our lives. In that regard, much more priority sifting has yet to follow as I narrow what is most important, useful, and targeted to my actual accomplishments.

For retrieval of my posts with greater relevance, logic and precision than Google has yet to provide, see CeptsFormIndex for those index links.

I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.

© Copyright 2009 by Roger Sween.

Acquisitions

Practices of CeptsForm Library

How the collection grew and reached its present scope

Background:
The library has been built over time exclusively to meet my interests as its proprietor. These interests have changed due to experience, discovery, and questioning and reflect the owner’s growing knowledge and desire to know and resolve intellectual issues. Principally, these issues descend from puzzlements over the self, others, and ideas.

Consequently, the library cannot be said to pursue any specific collection development plan but rather to follow in the direction of various developing interests that relatively recently have been identified as revolving around concepts and concept formation. This conceptual foundation came about by realization of actual preference and practice, not by deliberate or previously articulate intention. Prior to 1992, the books collected since the 1950s centered on history, classic and highly recommended literature, imaginative literature, some philosophy, some religion, and some attention to contemporary issues. When consciously examined as a whole, the one word that described it was Serious.

For several years, the library had been partially in storage and otherwise double-shelved in one 12 foot by 13 foot room. After 1992, the library moved to new quarters specifically designed for it, and for the first time in decades the entire library was out in the open on the shelf. Seeing the library as a whole and mapping it brought a new appreciation of its scope. With room to grow and the expectation that the library would in due time support my writing career, the collection took on a more decidedly conscious direction. Simultaneously, gaining more systematic bibliographic control over the collection became necessary due to its increasing complexity and my inability to remember exactly all of what it contains.

Towards 1998, the library gained identification as a collection focused on concepts and concept formation. This definition resulted ex post facto in examining the collection as a whole and determining what characterized it so that the question could be answered first for oneself and then to others: “What kind of books do you collect?”

For a retrospective statistical presentation of the changes in the collection classifications, see the Growth article.

In practice the collection has developed by reading experiences, personality preferences, and acquisition opportunities as outlined below.

Formative Reading Experiences:
When I began reading on my own in the third grade, I found such delight, wonder and excitement in books that I was hooked. Books caught me so completely because they took me to new, distant, past and imaginary places and simultaneously whetted and satisfied my hunger for discovery, integration, and understanding. From the first, books led to one another. Among the ones that influenced me most strongly are the following I remember specifically and most vividly, and I still think about them.

The titles listed cite edition information including copyright dates, when known, both as information and as my own confirmation of when I read them. In reality for most of this period, I was oblivious to dates of publication and except for classic works by long dead authors regarded every book as new and concurrent.

Formative reading when a child (1948-1952):
>Myths, such as Baldwin, A story of the golden age (1888); Colum, The golden fleece and the heroes who lived before Achilles (1921); Coolidge, The Trojan War (1952); Colum, The children of Odin (1920); King Arthur stories, such as Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and his knights (1903) and The story of the champions of the round table (1905); and other hero tales, as Robin Hood.


>The Oz books by Baum, especially The marvelous land of Oz (book 2, 1904); The Emerald City of Oz (book 6,1910); and The patchwork girl of Oz (book 7, 1913). Paul Bunyan stories; Brer Rabbit stories; Grahame, The wind in the willows (1908).


>The book of knowledge (1949) and the Dana collected biographies of scientists, inventors, explorers, and authors. Several biographies of Edison, Burbank and Steinmetz.

When in high school (1952-1958):
>More myths, especially Graves, The Greek myths (1955) and Homer’s daughter (1955); Morley, Thunder on the left (1925); Renault, The king must die (1958).


>Luther’s Small Catechism and The table talk of Martin Luther (Kepler; 1952). Bible, both the King James and Revised Standard (1942, 1956) versions.


>Ceram, i.e., Marek, Gods, graves and scholars (1951); Costain’s The Conquerors (1949), The magnificent century (1951), and The three Edwards (1958). Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitane and the four kings (1950). Rourke, Audubon (1936); Herodotus, The histories (de Sélincourt; 1954). Gibbon, The decline and fall of the Roman empire (Modern Library 3v. ed., n.d.)


>Machiavelli, The prince (Ricci, Vincent; 1954); Plato, The republic (Rouse; 1956). Durant, The story of philosophy (1927). The philosophy of Nietzsche (Modern Library; 1927): especially Thus Spake Zarathustra; Ecce Homo; and The Birth of Tragedy. Schnackenberg, Now or never: some reflections on the meaning of the fullness of time (1957).


>Kluckhon, Mirror for man (1949). Berrill, Man’s emerging mind (1955). Chase, Guide to straight thinking, with 13 common fallacies (1956). Huff, How to lie with statistics (1954). Adams, The wealth of nations (Bullock, 1909). Hoffer, The true believer (1951).


>Historical novels, such as Cronyn, The fool of Venus: the story of Piere Vidal (1934); Schoonover, The Spider King (1954); Waltari’s The Egyptian (1947) and The Etruscan (1956); Selinko, Desirée (English translation, 1953); McKenney, Mirage (1956); Tey, The daughter of time (1951); Wilder, The Ides of March (1948).


>The little prince, by Saint-Exupéry (Woods; 1943). Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (Bair; 1956). Wells, The invisible man (1898), The world set free (1914) and The research magnificent (1915). Dante’s The inferno (Ciardi; 1954) and The purgatorio (Ciardi; 1957). Hugo, The hunchback of Notre Dame (Bair; 1956); Morley, Parnassus on wheels (1917) and The haunted bookshop (1919). Voltaire, Candide. Erasmus, The praise of folly (Heritage, n.d.). Dostoyevsky’s The brother’s Karamozov (Garnett; 1950) and Crime and punishment (Garnett; 1956). Thurber, The thirteen clocks (1950). Lewis, The Screwtape letters (1943). Ibsen, A doll’s house. Camus, Exile and the kingdom (O’Brien; 1958). Rand, The fountainhead (1943). Maddux, The green kingdom (1957).

When in college (1958-1962):
>Bainton, Here I stand: a life of Martin Luther (1950) and Luther, Three treatises (1943): “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility;” “On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church;” “On Christian Liberty.” Lewis, The four loves (1960). Bonhoeffer, The cost of discipleship (2d ed., 1959). Aulén, The faith of the Christian church (Wahlstrom & Arden; 1948). Tillich, The courage to be (1952) and Love, power and justice (1954). Harnack, Outlines of the history of dogma (Mitchell; 1957). Bultmann, Jesus Christ and mythology (1958).


>Dimnet, The art of thinking (1928). Jung, The undiscovered self (1959). Dante, On world-government (Schneider, 1957). Plato, Apology and Phaedo (Rouse; 1956). Coombes, Literature and criticism (1958). Aristotle, The poetics. Leff, Medieval thought, St. Augustine to Ockham (1958). Gilson, Reason and revelation in the Middle Ages (1938). Becker, The heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers (1932). Camus, The myth of Sisyphus (O’Brien, 1955). Joad, Guide to philosophy (1936). Berdyaev, Slavery and freedom (French, 1944). Taylor, Elements of metaphysics (1903).


>Muller, The uses of the past (1952). Huntington, The mainsprings of civilization (1945). Childe, Man makes himself (rev.; 1951) and What happened in history (rev., 1952); Tacitus, The annals of Imperial Rome (Grant; 1956); Suetonius: The twelve Caesars (Graves; 1957); Nietzsche, The use and abuse of history (Collins; 1949). Ortega y Gasset, The revolt of the masses (English translation; 1932). The philosophy of history in our time (Meyerhoff; 1959). Dawson, The making of Europe (1932). Andrae, Mohammed (Menzel, rev.; 1955). Great issues in American history (Hofstadter, 1958).


>Homer, The Odyssey (both Rouse; 1937 and Rieu, 1946). Auden, For the time being (1945). MacLeish, J.B. (1958). Shaw, Don Juan in hell (1905). Paton, Cry, the beloved country (1948). Sophocles, Oedipus the King; Euripides, Medea. Huxley, Brave new world 1950). Rand, Atlas shrugged (1957); We the living (1936); Anthem (1946); and “For the new intellectual” (1961). Everyman. Woolf, Orlando (1928). Shakespeare, King Lear and The tempest. Lee, To kill a mockingbird (1960). Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago (1960). N. & B. Branden, Who is Ayn Rand? (1961). Ibsen, Brand (Jorgenson; 1962). Renault, The bull from the sea (1962). Faulkner, The reviers (1962).

Personality and Personal Development:
Certainly, this library grew out of and alongside the personality of its owner which became more introspective, self-aware, and analytical over time. Pertinent characteristics and viewpoints follow.

>A preference for reading as a means of learning and the belief that books connect learners with careful thinking across ages, distances and subjects.
>An appreciation of history as inclusive and only understandable as more human endeavors fit together in the mind.
>A realization that truth comes by pursuit, not by possession.
>An acceptance that one can be and often is wrong about what is thought to be known.
>A realization that the development and acceptance of ideas is slow and therefore old ideas in old writings are often as valuable or more so than when they were new.
>Experience that it is easier and more assured to judge the value of thoughts, writings, and books when they have been tested over time rather than when they are new.
>The observation that since individual book titles number in the millions and one can only read a few thousand in a lifetime, the ones that are worth reading are the ones that last over time and merit re-reading (or referring to) more than once.
>The discovery that many of the best books of the recent past or of all times are among the cheapest.
>Questions about how ideas originate, develop, become established and passed to others.
>Questions about the relation between personality and learning.
>Questions about forms of literature and the ability to write these forms well.

Purchasing Practices:
To a great extent, the collection reflects the opportunities to buy books and approaches taken to buy them. Growing up in a small town had its limitations, but from a young age onward buying books was more possible than could be afforded and choices had to be made. Drugstores in those days sold more books of quality than they do now; book clubs tempted and every trip out of town was a hunt for book stores. Thus, book buying habits formed.

>Since more books are wanted than can be easily afforded, collection wants are primarily satisfied by seeking books when they are lower priced.
>Since primary interest is in what has lasting value contrary to mass appeal, acquisition of current titles has less importance.
>Since it appears that many books wanted are not popular in the mass market sense or that interest in them peaks quickly and falls rapidly, those books will readily or eventually appear on the market at reduced prices.
>Since in most cases prices of books will come down over time, desired acquisitions are best satisfied by patience and willingness to look for the bargains.
>Since many subject areas benefit from redundancy, often one book on a subject is as worthwhile and useful as another.

Desire for the better books is informed by
>“best book” lists;
>histories of ideas and those books that express them with influence;
>books quoted by later books;
>authors found to be especially useful, informative, and expressive;
>questions or subjects probed in thoughtful, unique and productive ways;
>books which fall into principal areas of interest;
>books with promising departures or thoughts not previously encountered.

Therefore, books are to be obtained from
>any bookstore where one is willing to look, book by book, in potential areas;
>remainder shelves, shops, and catalogs;
>thrift shops, especially Goodwill, Salvation Army, and Savers;
>second hand and specialty bookstores;
>publishers’ catalogs, especially Dover, and others with sales;
>Friends of Library bookstores and sales;
>exchange shops and shelves;
>gifts and giveaways;
>bookclubs; paperback editions, and sales of older books;
>clearance and going-out-of-business sales.

Occasionally current interest is so high or fear of lost opportunity so strong that full or nearly full price is paid for books that are “worth it.”

Note: Reduced cost means some books are acquired that would not be purchased at a higher price. No doubt, cheaper books lower standards.