On My Mind – New Bookshelf – 4/1/2018

This was a really good week – for a whole host of reasons.  Good things happened at work – my sales teams exceeded their Q1 goals.  I had minimal travel – giving me the chance to stay close to home and to get some work done at the office.  My wife and I had a really fun weekend – dinner at one of our favorite restaurants on Friday night, a craft brewery tour on Saturday, finished a really fun book (The Rook), had a great Easter brunch today and a movie – “Ready Player One” – more on that later.  The icing on the cake, however, was the arrival of this beauty on Wednesday.

I  love this house we live in.  It’s an old house – built in 1925.  It’s full of old, beautiful wood.  It has those eccentricities and oddities and unique features that make it one of a kind.  It’s neither too big nor too small – just the right size for our family.  My daughter’s room is all her and my son has a third story, finished attic that he’s turned into his very own “Fortress Of Solitude”.  I’ve lived here for 7 years – longer than any home I’ve had since graduating from Law School and heading to D.C. for my first real job in 1987.  Since that time, I’ve lived in 3 different countries and 12 different residences.  My books have followed me through every single move but I’ve always had limited space to shelve and display them.  Very sadly, across most of those 30 years, the better part of my collection has been boxed and stored in either basements or paid storage.  For the first time in my life, this is no longer the case.

I actually have a library – my very own Sanctuary – a bibliocave.  It has one full wall of built-in book shelves supplemented by several additional free standing shelves.  The only other things allowed in here have some connection to Texas – artwork or Longhorn & Rangers memorabilia.  It fits me like a glove.  While I still have about 25 boxes stored away in our basement, I now have all my most valued titles on a shelf and available to me whenever I want to pick them up, poke through them to track down a memory or – to be completely honest – just sit in the chair in that Library and let my eyes roam – remembering just how much I’ve enjoyed what’s on those shelves.

Unfortunately, it’s bursting at the seams.  I have books double and triple stacked on all shelves and we we’re at wit’s end.  My wife finally convinced me to add more shelf space and here’s what we decided on – a really nice Barrister Book Case.  I’m not a big furniture guy but I have always loved these.  Books should be respected and well cared for and this type of case is the very best you can do in that regard.  When we do finally find our retirement home, it’s going to have space for a Library and I’m going to fill it with these – enough of them to take all of what I have at the time and still give my collection room to grow.  My wife texted me this picture at work on Wednesday – after the delivery – and I couldn’t wait to get home and start filling the shelves.

In addition to having a piece of furniture that I really love to look at – in addition to decluttering my shelves – this gave me the chance to think through my collection and make some decisions about favorite volumes.  This instantly became my most prominent and privileged shelf space – my top drawer – and I spent Wednesday night after work pulling most of my Science Fiction and Fantasy collection (most of my classics and history titles reside on a shelf downstairs in our office) off the current shelves and moving them around.  My wife came home from a meeting around 8:00 and found me on my knees in the Library surrounded by stacks of books.  To her credit, she left me to my silly pleasure and just asked that I get to the point where we could see the floor again before we called it a night.

It was not an easy task – almost every book I have in that Library is special in some way or another – choosing among them took far more time than I’d expected but – by around 10:30 – I was done.  Here’s what I’ve chosen to fill that new shelf with:

• Everything Tolkein:  That part of the collection is bigger than most would think.  At some point, I’ll post a list of all my books in this category but for now, it’s enoug to say that everything in this collection requires a shelf and a half.
• Four Volume, Leather Bound, Slip Covered Comprehensive Horatio Hornblower Collection:  The only books on this shelf that aren’t SFF but they were chosen because they were early favorites of mine and because they make me think of my Dad.
• 15 Volume Tale Of The Eternal Champion Compendium Edition:  I don’t remember when I found the first of these volumes but I bet that I’ve spent the better part of 25 years tracking these all down.  I posted on these books the day that the last one arrived.  The Multiverse and the many flawed versions of the Eternal Champion have always been compelling to me.  They were an easy choice.
• The Change and The Nantucket Series’ by S.M. Stirling:  This is a mammoth collection totaling 17 books – 3 in The Nantucket Series and 14 in The Change Series.  I also added a few of Stirling’s other titles – The Dominion (a compendium edition of his Draka novels), The Peshawar Lancers and Conquistador.  With a few notable exceptions, I’ve truly enjoyed every book that Stirling has written and the two intertwined Series are magnificent alternate histories.
• All of the collected works of Steven Erikson and Ian C. Esslemont:  These books have been a particular source of pleasure for many years and I’ve posted on them several times.  I have a post that lays out the books in order of occurrence as well as several that capture impressions from the re-reading process that I’m currently about a third of the way through.

Those were my choices – not easy as several other authors certainly deserved a place on that book case – Steven Brust, David Weber, Raymond Feist or Glen Cook to name a few.  At the end of the day, however, all of these felt right.  Besides, if I have doubts or second thoughts, it’s easy enough to move a few books around.  Short to long – it was a pleasure.

One final thought on this for anyone who’s interested.  If you ever wonder about the strength of your relationship, give some thought to whether your partner is supportive of your borderline irrational, out of control hobbies.  Sue, my wonderful wife, puts up with this crazy collector’s urge in such a beautiful way.  I know there are times when she comes home to a box on the front door step and just shakes her head.  There were many times when she might have just gotten tired of it all and insisted that I move some of these titles off the shelf and into boxes.  There were times when we needed the space in that Library for other, truly important things.  I know it tried her patience at times but – to her credit – she’s been nothing but patient and understanding and supportive.  She shows how much she loves me in so many ways and this is one that never, ever, ever goes unnoticed or unappreciated.  Thank you Angel.