Sunday, May 3, 2020

Stay-at-home shelfie #37 (sort of)



These don't technically count as shelfies, because they aren't on shelves! Having reached the bottom of the tall bookshelf that began with United Kingdom history, we find that the floor beneath the shelf has some neat piles of books.1 No proper practitioner of tsundoku would have more shelves than books; there must always be some overflow. Thus, these books are currently in a bit of limbo. Some are recent acquisitions. Some were displaced during the latest round of sorting and reshelving and haven't yet found their new spots.

In the first photo, we have the random volume Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat and some compilations from Mmuseumm, which I mentioned in a post last autumn. There's a small stack of books about the fear of nuclear armageddon and the "strategy" of mutally assured destruction during the Cold War; I picked those up last year at the York Emporium during a rush of minor intrigue about the topic, but, in our current moment, it's no longer a slice of history I have a huge reading appetite for. It's more like The Stand season, right?

The Television Culture Section has been relegated to this spot, too. There are books with "Good" in the title about Carol Burnett and Fred Rogers, which seems appropriate. The David Bianculli and Robert J. Thompson books were read years ago, when I was devouring anything about St. Elsewhere. Bianculli's Dictionary of Teleliteracy, from 1995, is a particularly good browsing book, though we've had a quarter-century of milestone viewing moments since it was published.

In the second photo, there are numerous books about antiques, which were displaced when I was making room for the Ruth M. Arthur and Geoffrey Palmer/Noel Lloyd books. There were 2018 posts about From Witchcraft to World Health and Sold to the Lady in the Green Hat. And there are two 2014 posts about A Dictionary of American Antiques; if you read this one, it will also link you back to the first one. I could probably be talked into parting with a couple of these books about antiques; if you're interested, drop me a line at the email address at the top of the page.

The final pile contains a Carl Sagan book that belongs with the science volumes, more computer-related books — including Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (lots of Infocom stuff in that one) — and a book that might or might not have once belonged to THE Dan Rather. I also declare that this is the only pile anywhere that includes both a book about American actress Maude Adams and a book about Gef the talking supernatural mongoose. So there.

(Is it just me, or are these shelfie posts getting longer and longer?)

Footnote
1. Related recent headline from BBC News: "Coronavirus: Library books rearranged in size order by cleaner."

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