Building a library the right way
For as nearly long as I can remember, my family has had a heck ton of books at home. When we moved into this apartment around a decade ago, they developed a habit of buying them online (usually including multiple ones we had no need for to reach the online bookstore's free shipping threshold), and started slowly accumulating them over the years. Now, we have three separate library areas in the house, 11 bookcases, and, roughly estimating, around a thousand books in total.
It was nice to always be able to find something in the house that could catch my interest throughout my formative years. It definitely led to me reading a lot more than I would've otherwise.
However, I think our home library leaves a lot to be desired. Here are some of the things about it that have consistently annoyed me for the past 10 years:
- We own a lot of books no one in the family could possibly be interested in reading. Why do we have The Idiot's Guide to Auto Repair when we don't even own a car?
- Some of our books are extraordinarily ugly. I'm actually interested in reading Bernardo Diaz's The Conquest of New Spain, but the edition we own is so hideous I've always passed over it in favor of some other history book in the multiple years since we bought it.
- It left the house a mess at times. My parents seldom thought of where they would put books when buying them, which left us with sagging double-stacked shelves and piles of them on the living room table and floor. On three separate occasions, I somehow managed to clear our living room of excess books, only for my parents to refill it with fresh ones within a few months.
None of this is to say that I disliked the library. It was something special, something visitors commented positively on, something to be proud of. But it could've been done better. And that's what I'm determined to do once I have my own place.
Granted, I'll be living in a tiny college dorm for the next four years starting next month, which definitely does not have room for large bookshelves. However, I think there are still some good purchasing habits I can develop over my college years, that'll transfer over when I move into a proper house:
- Be thoroughly informed about a book's physical attributes before comitting to keeping it forever in my house. This is easy if I'm buying at a physical bookstore, but I'll have to shop online for some specific books; in that case, I'll make sure to know the dimensions and materials before buying it. No online bulk-ordering dozens of items at once as, my parents were apt to do.
- Only purchase books I intend to re-read multiple times. In practice, this means I'll mostly be buying ones I've already read in digital form, which I know is good stuff. However, if I find something I absolutely love while browsing a bookstore, I can get that too.
Once I have a house, I also want extremely strong bookcases. When I said "sagging" shelves earlier in this post, I meant it literally. Nearly every shelf in our house is slightly concave upward, lower in the middle than on the sides. I had to repeatedly reorganize our books to put the lighter ones in the middle of shelves and higher up, and the heavier ones to the sides and lower down. And even with these measures we've had a shelf on our largest bookcase collapse.
I'm sick of that. I want each bookcase in my house to be so structurally sound, it doesn't matter if I put a 8-pound encyclopedia on the top shelf. I'll make them myself if I have to, but by gosh each shelf will be one-inch thick, and fastened with nuts, bolts and angle brackets in all four corners, or something stronger.
In the end, I'm grateful I grew up in a house with a messy library rather than one with none at all. But there's no reason why I can't have one that's organized. And I will.