Boxes of Books

So, in my living room, I have 8*5*3=120 boxes of books right now.  It's a large living room, there's a lot of space left over.  Moving them from the garage freed up a bunch of space for more stuff from Portland. OK, 15 or 16 of those boxes are fiction magazines, mainly science fiction. And then an additional 15 boxes of magazines, mainly woodworking journals.  Then four boxes of DVDs and VHS tapes.

Mind, those boxes are right where the stereo equipment wants to go; this isn't a long term storage solution, I need to put up shelving and debox this stuff.  And there's a bunch more boxes of books still in the basement in Portland, waiting to move north.  But my underlying philosophy of life is simple: walls are a place to put shelving for books.  My reality is that I may not have enough walls.  I might actually find myself having to weed the collection, something I hadn't done previously because, well, due to various incidents many of my books had been in boxes for a while and couldn't be gone through.  And the whole weeding criteria of do I see myself seriously needing access to this book in the future, and if so, could I reasonably do so without owning a copy?  I've got a lot of books where the answer to the second question is no, I couldn't obtain access to it if I didn't own it; lots of SF and Fantasy novels have only been published in paperback, and libraries don't have copies of them anymore.  The same holds true for genre romance fiction.

Then there are the works for which there are electronic versions running around.  And there the question is how is access controlled, and can one download replacement copies if you've had a disk crash?  How stable is the economic outlook for the company controlling access to the electronic versions; will they still be around if I needed to redownload?  Borders went out of business, after all; mind, part of why they went out of business was that they hadn't latched onto electronic media to the extent that Barnes & Noble has, but there are lots of people out there who don't utilize electronic media, Borders just hadn't diversified enough to weather the current depression when book sales took a dive, unlike Barnes & Noble which has added a great many things to their market presence, and we won't talk about how thoroughly diversified Amazon is.

But I wander a bit astray from kvetching and kvelling about how many books I have.  The reality is that I don't have as much space as I had in Portland. I have less storage space all around, even given the huge garage; after all, the garage is supposed to become a shop.  So at the least I'll be making decisions about what goes on open shelves, and what stays in boxes, and how I keep track of what is where.

That's enough for now.