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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?
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?