https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/style/do-you-have-bookshelf-wealth.html
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I read a story a last week about how the US Ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, had asked Jamie Dimon to fund a remake of the library in the stately Ambassador’s Residence in Tokyo where Rahm often received dignitaries. The library had a mix of cookbooks, travel guides, and children’s coloring books. While accurately reflecting US culture under the previous Administration, Rahm thought something more upmarket and intellectual was in order.
Old, old, joke: “the Vice President’s library burned down. A tragedy. Both books were burned. And he had not even finished coloring one of them”
The US court report books look really nice. There are lots of them around. I read somewhere that set dressers for TV shows and movies buy books to stock the shelves in a set, in bulk, by the foot or yard, of shelf length.
I’ve bought some stunningly beautiful leather bound gold embossed classic novels for $5/box, (large,) at auction. Sometimes $1. Auctions are a great place to learn the idiocy of paying full price for collectables. It was depressing to see so many once well loved collections sell for pennies on the dollar, if not fractions of pennies.
In the downsizing process over the recent decade, we have given away thousands of books. Many were kids books as our guys became adults and I faced the realization that if they gave us grandkids, the likelihood was a preference for reading on their phone, as our kids do. I only kept the crawl in my lap and I will read to you picture books for pre-readers.
Most of my personal inventory is from library sales, the first of which I did at about 10. Even then the last day of a sale was $1/box. Bro and I picked out HUGE boxes from a clothes washer and dryer. Picked up some really cool books, some of which I still have now, as the low cost allowed me to throw books in there that might be interesting someday.
Electronic readers do make sense from a storing and moving POV, but to me there is nothing better than holding a book in your hands, curled up in a chair. These days, most books I read go into a Little Free Library, rather than back on the shelf. Sadly this is one form of wealth no one in our family seems to want to inherit.
I was really steamed at my local public library a few months ago. There was something I wanted to look up, in a book I had checked out a year ago. Tried to pull it up on their website to jot down the call number. Could not find it. Found the shelf anyway, and saw it was gone. Then I noticed another book, that I had seen there a year ago, and wanted to read this winter, is also gone. Started asking questions. The library culled it’s collection last year. I ran into their used book store to look for the books. Not there. I’m steamed. My taxes paid for those books. Told the guy they way overdid the cull, because the shelf was not full a year ago, and now it’s 3/4ths empty. They did not “need” to dispose of those books, for a tiny fraction of what my taxes paid for them, because they did not have a space shortage on that shelf.
My understanding is that what they pull has most to do with how little it’s loaned, at least in fiction. As technology changes, with most cars not having cd players anymore, I have a growing collection of books on cd for hours in the car for travel. Many of the books in the library sales are also from donations.
The number of people going to our library has gone down so much, even with all the kids programming they added, that they are now closed on Saturdays. I would like to believe that perhaps it’s just so much easier today to access books from home, but suspect the TV is the real competition.
Mine closes at 6 on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but the parking lot is packed on weekend afternoons. Yes, the guy said they used a frequency of checkout rule for the cull, but the whole point of a library is to have things that individuals would not use frequently enough to have in their personal collection.
One of the books I wanted to look at (The Grand Fleet, by D K Brown) is on Hoopla, so can be read on line. The other, that I wanted to read cover to cover (Six Frigates) is not, so, now, I would need to have the library transfer in a copy from another library. Thing is, “Six Frigates” was only published in 2006. As historical books go, that is new. Another one I had transferred in a few months ago (Fifty Ships That Saved The World) was published in the 60s. (that one was about the bases for ships deal between the US and UK in 1940)
Sounds like he needs some training in reference materials, which should not be circulation based for culling.
I was a reference librarian at a small university, when our kids were small. As our guys went through school, I was shocked at how all their “research” papers, and I use that term lightly, were based on internet sources. Almost no use of library resources. Lazy on the teacher’s part and probably part of the reason why the libraries are less and less critical these days. The role of librarian has been steered more and more to the digital world, which certainly should have complemented the physical collection, but not replaced it.
IP,
shuddering at what an EMP blast would do to the US
These books were circulating, thought I used “The Grand Fleet” as a reference book, because it covers a variety of topics under than umbrella. Seems that, culling a shelf, when it is not overcrowded, is excessive. Their culling rule should have been tempered with common sense, and only thinning shelves that were overcrowded. Walking through the library to get to the shelf where those books were, I noticed how empty nearly every shelf seemed. I think I did a post on my FB page about “a library without books”.
Why is that a problem? We do it all the time. One has to be a little more careful to return it on time and the checkout often can’t be extended, but you get the book.
This is true, though the delay can be a week or two. What I am barking about is the library spent my tax dollars to buy a book, then disposed of it, at a fraction of it’s cost, in excess of it’s immediate need for shelf space. I don’t mind paying taxes, as long as due care is exercised in the spending of my tax dollars.
Same thing with organizations that I donate money to. I expect due care in the spending of that money. Some years ago, a local aviation museum launched a fascinating project, which I was very enthused about, and donated a few hundred to. Then, after blowing over $10M of it’s supporter’s money, the museum announced they had changed their mind, and were going to do something else. That museum is now dead, as far as I am concerned. Not one more penny.
During the publicity blitz for the project, the local PBS station did this documentary on the project. This is an important story, and the museum could tell the story where it actually happened. $10M later, they write that project off, and start dunning people for more money, to do something else.
On the other hand, if the book was not circulating as expected, then the error in spending your tax dollars was in buying the book in the first place, particularly if another copy was available in the lending network.
One thing we love about our library is that we can go online, login to their system, and order a copy of any book in the system, or even in other adjacent systems sometimes. It may take some time for it to arrive, but eventually it does arrive.
Once the book is on the shelf, it’s cost becomes a sunk cost. What is the cost, going forward, of keeping it on the shelf? I don’t recall that shelf being jam packed a year ago. Now, that shelf, like many others in the library has more empty space that books, so the marginal value of freeing 1" of shelf space is zero. On the other hand, keeping the book on the shelf has value for the taxpayer that paid for it.
I do the same thing. I was doing a deep dive into the design of a certain class of battleships last year. Had them transfer three or four books in, in working that issue. But, shuffling books around has a cost for the library. If they had had one of those books on the shelf, it would have been cheaper for them to keep the book, than toss it, and transfer one in for me.
Used to have “bookshelf wealth” but then we did a house remodel. Got me to thinking, how many of these books have I ever re-read. Hardy any. So loaded up the SUV to donate to the library and actually bottomed out the shocks. Kept autographed books and a few other “high end” productions but greatly thinned the collection. I now almost exclusively buy e-books although the in-laws gifted me a book this Christmas.
Ah, physical books imperilled by digital destruction.
My family’s library is the life’s blood, treasure, and indicial history of both my mother’s and father’s pioneering families as they moved from 17th Century New Amsterdam, Maine, and Massachusetts to mid 19th C Oregon and California, and came down to us.
Even after culling for duplicates, mediocre fiction, and tedious textbooks, our family library is immense and dates back two centuries (a wondrous carpenter/engineer handbook published in Boston in 1805, an 1820 Bible, and an 1835 Webster dictionary). There are 23 feet just of philosophy books, most with marginal notes and musings and queries by my father and grandfather, but a few of my own. We are now starting to disperse it from the crammed to the rafters two bedroom condominium of my deceased parents to my nephews, nieces, and 2nd cousins, but all linked by a familial digital index we completed last year. Some items are being donated to appropriate keepers who will NOT get rid of them (e.g. a huge collection of mountaineering journals, guides, and route maps dating back to 1895 going to the Sierra Club).
When I moved to Mexico I brought along 6 feet of books I cannot be without. They have already been allotted to two nephews. Fortunately, the heirs all seem as enchanted by printed pages as their ancestors were.
