"A New York Treasure" --Village Voice

The Stacks

Check out these blog posts about how people organize their books. I’ve arranged my books by topic but am too lazy to do it by author within a topic. Sometimes, I do it by size, or I clump together one author’s titles.

Once a year, I might be inspired to clean the mess up but maintaining it is another thing. Plus, I’m forever running out of space so things tend loose any sense of strict purpose. What I need is more space (the New Yorker’s lament), or less books, or a nook or a kindle. But I can’t imagine not collecting more books. It’s how I was raised and I don’t see it stopping.

Course, there’s also the books that are stacked on my night table, but here’s a look some of my library.

6 comments

1 Ben   ~  Dec 1, 2011 11:32 am

Jacques Pepin. I watch him cook an omelet, then I cook an omelet. Best ever. Two days later I can't do it again. So i watch him do it, then I do it, perfection again. Another few days. Ruin. I wish the lesson stuck as well as the eggs.

2 Alex Belth   ~  Dec 1, 2011 11:50 am

I want to go over his house for dinner.

3 thelarmis   ~  Dec 1, 2011 1:19 pm

my addiction is collecting cd's. my brother and i are both avid music collectors and we each have over 5,000 cd's, apiece. while i have over a thousand vinyl, he has waaaay more than that. i still have over 1,000 tapes, but they're all in boxes and cases and stashed away in closets, along with hundreds of music vhs tapes. i've got over a hundred dvd's, but i'm not planning on adding much more. i do have a decent library of books, on all sorts of topics, though mostly music & baseball.

one of the (many) reasons i moved out of my old apt, was i completely ran outta room for my discs. i had no furniture left, 'coz kitchen & dining room tables were completely covered with giant stacks of cd's. my pop has done a great job building cool cabinets for us, plus i've bought a ton you put together yourself.

i try to file everything alphabetical/chronological, but as i've added soooo many units to my collection, it's hard to keep up. now, i've got all kinds of filing methods, but all remain alpha/chrono.

i keep all my blue note jazz cd's in 1 place. i have a few separate "metal" cabinets. huge collections of mine, like those for Joe Jackson and Frank Zappa, are separated. i've been thinking of putting all my Classical in one spot. i've got hundreds of cd's that i'm on in one or two places. i also have discs in the car and at my studio...

most people nowadays say to put it all on some type of electronic device and sell the discs. no, No and NO!!! never gonna happen. i love collecting the discs.

4 Bluenatic   ~  Dec 1, 2011 5:02 pm

The Joys of Yiddish. Yes!

5 kenarneson   ~  Dec 1, 2011 7:43 pm

This is going to be a lost art. When we remodeled our house last year to give our daughters their own bedrooms, the thing that ended up being sacrificed to make room was my bookshelves. All my music is on iPods now, and I just got a Kindle for reading books. I still have a short little shelf to keep a handful of books I'm reading, but once I'm done with them, out they go. Don't have room to keep them anymore.

6 Alex Belth   ~  Dec 2, 2011 9:37 am

5) Yeah, it's the space that becomes the deciding factor...

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"This ain't football. We do this every day."
--Earl Weaver