ex libris confessions of a common reader

Anne Fadiman and her husband George, who shares her love of books, have had to face this problem.

The fiction shelves in the lounge room (a particularly crowded loungeroom at the moment because it has to also accommodate my precariously-balanced Christmas tree) are doubled up, but at the moment the non-fiction shelves in the study are single-row only and share the space with scanners, printer paper, recipe books and unopened issues of ABR and The Monthly.īut how to merge our collections? It’s quite clear that there’s not room for both Mr R.J.’s books and my own. However, I’ve become increasingly aware of the ephemerality of book availability nowadays with books often restricted to the initial edition and shunted off the shelves for the next new thing, so I tend to buy more non-fiction than I used to. My collection is much more modest, and particularly in the relatively new shelves in the study (which is itself a new incarnation of my son’s bedroom now that he’s moved out of home), there’s PLENTY of space to buy more! I’m more a library-gal myself and I make good use of the “place hold” function on the library catalogue to borrow books that I see in bookshops selling new.

He ALWAYS finds good books amongst towering piles in second-hand bookshops, even though I might have looked at the same pile just two minutes earlier.Īnd yes, they are doubled-up on the shelves. He is equally reluctant to relinquish them. He reads more voraciously than I do, and is happy to have his reading diet determined by what he finds in op-shops, garage sales and fetes. He is the most appalling library patron, accumulating fines with gay abandon. I suppose that at some stage we will actually live in the same house- but what to do with the books? and I have quite distinct collections aided by the rather unconventional design of our living arrangements- we live in two separate but joined units with our own separate lounge rooms, kitchens, bedrooms etc. Its opening chapter concerns the merging of book collections of two avid readers and immediately this struck home. The book as object is itself a thing of beauty- very small, with a tasteful crimson and gold cover with what looks like a gold-embossed bookplate on the front. Hence, the chapters are short (4 or 5 pages), snappy and personal and you come to feel that you are in the company of a good friend who shares your love of reading. The book is a compilation of “The Common Reader” columns that over a number of years Anne Fadiman contributed to Civilization magazine, the journal of the Library of Congress. None of this may seem significant, but after reading this small delightful morsel of a book you’ll realize that it is. He bought it second-hand for $1.99 at an op-shop and inscribed it.

Ex libris confessions of a common reader