ndrosen ([personal profile] ndrosen) wrote2021-12-13 12:31 am
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“Books Do Furnish a Civilization”

Joseph Epstein has an article in the December issue of Commentary: “Books Do Furnish a Civilization,” about libraries, personal, public, and institutional. I benefited by reading some of my parents’ many books, and I remember that when they were planning to move from their own house to an apartment in a retirement community, and needed to downsize their book collection, my father asked me whether I wanted any of their books; I declined. If I had been there, I might have gone through the shelves and chosen some, but I didn’t know which books they were planning to give or sell as opposed to taking with them, and didn’t have a list of my own of things that I wanted.

In hindsight, it would have been nice to acquire a few books for myself: some history books, like Peter Green’s Alexander to Actium, which I don’t recall seeing afterward in my parents’ apartment, or a book or two by Bernard Lewis. When my mother died, my sister and brother gave most of the remaining library (I picked out a few for myself) to a university in Fujian, China.

I wonder what will happen to my own more modest book collection when I die. Will someone want my sf, or my Georgist tomes, or some other stuff? Will there be much reading of anything that isn’t on Kindles or the Internet?

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