The Pickle Meme, Complete with Pictures

The beatings in high school, the beatings in middle school, the beatings in elementary school, and the beatings in kindergarten nearly had me convinced otherwise, but this settles it: I've been memed.  I belong.

1. How do you organize your collection?  The Littlewomedievalist and I segregate our academic books from our general fiction, history, philosophy, &c.  Then our academic books are sorted up on the basis of ownership.  As you can see from the first photo on the left, the back bedroom is now a haven for books on medieval literature, philosophy, and history.  To your right is the shelf in which all the books at all germane to my dissertation live.  Other books squat there too, as you can tell: the works of literary journalism I teach occupy the second shelf.  (Not pictured are chess books on the first shelf.  No one needs to know how many chess books I've read.)  The organizing principle behind this arrangement stresses convenience and pains the parts of my brain which demand order.  I tend to use my shelves as a mneumonic, with books rotating alongside the rhythm of my work.  So you can tell from the books on the right-hand side of that picture that I'm working on something that involves the popularization of science (The Blank Slate and Collapse), William and Henry James, popular American novels, and debates about the nature of the realism/naturalism distinction.  These are the high traffic Americanist books, the ones whose rotations are so regular they're housed immediately beside my desk.  Next to the kitchen, an anonymous Ikea bookshelf still bears the scars of my qualifying exams.  You can see the generalist quality of this shelf: the theory I needed to work through my Theory list, the classics of American literary criticism, &c.  Because it's adjacent to the kitchen, it also suffers the occasional invasion of convenience: I finished Lethem's Fortress of Solitude and needed some crackers, so now it sits beside some Kenneth Burke and (inexplicably) Charles Lyell.  (The Lyell shouldn't be there.  It misbehaves and will be punished.)  The only other features of our collection worth mention are Theoryland and the Science Fiction & Irish Literature ghetto.  Theoryland is stacked three rows deep.  While I wish this were some clever commentary on "the depth of the books," it's really a testament to Gigantor--the 8.32 ft. tall solid-cherry monster once home to an ornamental law library but purchased for $80 in a secondhand shop--and his marketing prowess.  All the books want to live on Gigantor.  The sublime materiality of a 318 lbs. bookshelf in an apartment almost exclusively festooned with particle-board attracts all the best books.  They know that social mobility flows both ways.  On Monday you're right where you want to be, sandwiched between Derrida and Deleuze, a complete set of Durant's Story of Civilization above your head; on Tuesday you awake dazed in unfamiliar and unfriendly environs, comics and graphic novels to your left, Vintage reprints of Phillip K. Dick novels to your right.  You'll wonder when it all went so terribly, terribly wrong. 

2. What books or records do you keep separate from your collection for easy access?  As I've already mentioned, the books which feed the dissertation's fires live on the bookshelf to the immediate left of my desk.  Migrations to-and-from the desk occur with stunning regularity: I should remember the gist of that passage in Our America, the standard abbreviation for seaborgium (Sg), or what naturalism is.  The most attractive feature of this system is that it allows me to construct bookshelves out of books.  The more time they spend on my desk, the more likely they are to become a feature of it.  The stacks of books doubling as bookends contain the material I consult with desperate abandon four or five times daily.  This system's actually quite inconvenient.  I have to remove all the books on top of the book I want in order to read it.  It's the product of the monthly straightening of the material on my desk into neatly disorgnized stacks and is a terrible, terrible idea. 

3. When you take down a book for reference, how long after you finish it does it take you to reshelve it?  I like Adam's idea: when I'm finished with a book I ought to put it back and bask in feelings of accomplishment.  But as I haven't accomplished anything yet, and as I compulsive chech and re-check the source material for the work I've already done, reshelving isn't really an issue yet.  But that's the dissertation talking.  Before the books I "needed" to write the beast started occupying multiple rows on multiple shelves, like Adam I reshelved as I moved from project-to-project.  Now that I don't know who I'll need off the bench from one day to the next, I prefer to keep them all handy in the aforementioned bookshelf-of-books.

4. What resources do you keep separate from your collection because you don't want anyone to know you have it?  There's a reason it's called the Science Fiction & Irish Literature Ghetto.  (What do you mean the Irish don't deserve it?  Of course they do.)  One day I'm sure I'll break down and sell some books.  Undiscussed above are some shelves in a dark hallway containing the detritus of the Don Stafford collection.  Stafford was an English professor at LSU, and when he died the used bookstore I worked at for 4 years acquired his collection.  I'm not sure what possessed me to purchase the complete works of Samuel Tyler Coleridge, but I did.  Now they sit on a shelf waiting to be sold.  But unlike Miriam, I can't bring myself to sell them.  They're books.  They're meant to be hoarded. 

Now it's my turn to tag: Ralph and Gzombie, consider yourself memed.

Double Super Precious Update Alert!  The Littlewomedievalist informs me that she has a section reserved for new arrivals.  When a package like the one on the left arrives, she promptly removes its contents and places them on the "new arrivals" shelf pictured on the right.

Comments

[David]

I must warn you sternly that, should you post any more cat photos, I'm going to beat you savagely while screaming, "No tales of your surrogate children! None! Go knock up your wife already, Kaufman!"

Ciao!

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Sorry, but we prefer to think for the ones we love.

[Camicao]

OK, your shelves look way too neat. It looks like you've got enough space to be organized in the first place. I'm really jealous.

[language hat]

One day I'm sure I'll break down and sell some books.

Hahahaha! Er, I mean: hold on to that thought. It will aid in preserving your sanity over the coming decades. It will not, however, actually happen; or rather, you will sell a drib here and a drab there as the books continue to cascade in by the shelfload, until the sig. oth. starts wondering about the load-bearing capacity of the floor you're thinking of putting a new bookcase on.

Or so a guy told me once. I wouldn't know.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

For what it's worth, those close-ups aren't accidental. They 1) have impressive books on them, 2) were relatively neat to begin with and 3) underwent a quick straightening before I took the shot. I could've shown what the entirety of Gigantor looks like, but then you'd know me for the slob I am.

[Stephen]

I have seen Acephalous and the Little Womedievalist's apartment and can confirm that Camicao has no reason for jealousy, space-wise. Four cats, five thousand books, and two (thankfully skinny) people squished into a very tiny place.

[The Little Womedievalist]

The Schryer is right. Ceph, I, and the cats have been forced to go on strict diets just to free up more space for our new sections on Lollardy and London. Jack. (London, not Jack Lollard--a curiously titillating combination, nevertheless...)

Hmm. Hey, Ceph, just out of curiosity, if our books were to follow Bubonic David's advice--that is, if our books were to get a little too friendly and make book babies, what kind of offspring would they produce? (Feel free to turn to Mendel on this one.)

A few possibilities (in article form):

"London, Lollards and the Literal Sense"
"Alliterative London"
"The Sea-Wolfstan"
"The Call of the Wyclif" (I can hear the groan of the Schryer...)