I love stacks of books. I think they're an art form all their own that tell you about the inside of a person's head. Or, I supposed they don't tell you as much as they suggest, evoke, invite. You can imagine and suppose a lot about Biffle and me from the books Baxter's reclining among on the masthead of our blog.
I was getting ready to clean off my desk this morning and decided I'd record the books stacked there before reshelving them all. I'm finishing up my own book (not finished yet, but the end is in sight), and these are the books that have been accumulating beside me as I work.
10 years ago
3 comments:
I used to buy used books for a living and this invariably involved organizing someone's offerings into stacks about the size pictured above. Even though I rarely got into meaningful conversation, I felt I knew my customers pretty well if they brought in around 100 books.
I could tell where the books were stored, whether they were read or belonged to a family member, whether the books were loved or just a potential source of money.
What does Alison's stack show? That she is a working academic - it's almost impossible to parse personality from a faculty library. Also a lot of these books are library check outs - books that have to be read but not dear enough to be owned. In other words it shows what Alison has been up to, but not who she is.
Other things to note -
Disciplining Feminism only looks read in the first quarter, and as a library book this is somewhat damning on the student body given that it's been out a few years.
Alison loves books and reads with two hands not one.
Damn, that is some pretty good close reading of this visual artifact, Ian.
I always enjoyed looking over your book stacks and shelves when I pet-sat for you. Moving my 26 boxes of books (plus two full suitcases) to Connecticut made me see the book stack in a different light, though. I now know that a) I will have to move in one year to a space that can accommodate my books and b) I won't want to actually move the books.
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