L for library .:. EN / RU

I love to read, and I ruined my eyesight already when I was a teenager. At the same time, I began to collect my first library. It was going from high school, continuing at the university and until about 30 years old - when I moved to another city. I never counted the totals, but there were a lot of books ... I think more than one, but less than two thousands :)

That library stayed in my parents' apartment, I can show you a fresh photo I took last summer - now my sister and her children are in charge of the library, of course, she has changed and looks very different.

These are not all books, but most of them, the "core"... (I will note in brackets that my arrangement of books has already been greatly changed and is determined by the task of hiding some books from children's hands, of which there are many... and a bunch of books were added by my sister ).

As a child, the core of the library was fiction, and sci-fi in the first place - I was a big fan. Then, as I grew older, diversification and dilution began, first with the authors of classical literature, then with textbooks, reference books, books on biology and oceanography (another big hobby of mine in my youth), and then with history books.

The books I valued most - from the series "Foreign SF" - were published from 1965 to the 1990s, and I hunted for them for years at second-hand bookshops as for rare antiques. It is this "vintage" series paperbacks that you see in the photo above. But as for my absolute fave book -- I will postpone this part to the end of my story :)

When I moved to another city, my wife already had her own library. I could not transport all my things, so the library and I split up - partially. Two boxes of books left with me anyway :)

In the photo above: of the two shelves, about 2/3 are history books. After school, I accidentally fell into the hands of the book "The Decline of Europe" by Oswald Spengler. (It was printed by the printing house where I worked). She infected me with a love of history. In those days, I was more interested in the history of modern times and the colonial division of the world, the wars of the 19th century, military history and the Second World War, and of course the medieval history of the Russian state, starting from its creation.

So, I turned out to be the happy owner of a reprint edition of the Archive of the Russian Revolution in 22 volumes (pictured in the left corner). No, I could not read these books in their entirety; for me, young then, this topic turned out to be unbearable. History is an endless field, it can be plowed (asked questions) and harvested many many times.

But I will not brag about everything that I have on this topic. History books, and textbooks left over from the days of the university, all remained with my parents - anyway, I have already read them. Now I read books on history mostly in electronic form, and the focus has shifted to the history of the ancient world.

You will laugh - but some of my favorite books, I buy again, because I like to communicate with a real paper book that has its own personality, it is communication with a friend .... and of course, I buy old editions, the ones with which I've been in a relationship before :)

Some of my books. Yes, I like to read several books at the same time... but no, this is not the current content of my desk - I just made a beautiful photo shoot, and these books, laid out on my bed, are matched here for the aged paper color :)

Advertising! Advertising! :) My wife and I love the ONYX Darvin ebook reader - we bought two of the same. And a significant part of the library is inside these devices, and is read with their help.

I will not get involved in the dispute "which is better - a paper book or an electronic one." Each of them has its pros and cons. Imagine that tomorrow there will be an atomic war, with all its "pleasant" consequences, somehow: you will not have spare parts and the ability to repair your reader, and the world around becomes harsh and rough ... the reader is a very fragile product, breaks from one a careless blow, and absolutely nothing can be read if there is no electricity and the battery of the book reader is dead. All this is worth bearing in mind. And real, paper books - they are not even so easy to burn. They are well stored and do not require electricity ... and most importantly, they are pleasant to read and hold in your hands! Although you can't carry many books on your back, it's true. Therefore, if you are not a digital nomad, then it is better to have a large library of paper books.

Now I will try to remember my favorite authors in the fantasy genre ... beware, there are a lot of them! Robert Heinlein, Robert Sheckley, Clifford Simak, Roger Zelazny, Stanislav Lem, Philip Dick, Paul Anderson, Harry Harrison, J. Martin, Lois Bujold, William Gibson, Victor Pelevin, Vyacheslav Rybakov, Lazarchuk, Uspensky, Lukyanenko, Zvyagintsev... This is just the tip of the NF iceberg! :)

Enough about fantasy. NF was once "the core of my library," but not now that it has become my family's library. When merging with the wife's book collection, it added a lot of books, especially classical literature, as well as completely new departments! including, of course, children's literature :)

main sections / structure

World classics are immense, and this is really the case when it is worth delegating to a public library, or an electronic reader ... well, except for favorite authors and books that you often want to take off the shelf. For example, I prefer to have Jack London, Kipling or Remarque nearby, and Pushkin too. But I take Dickens in the library. Remarque's "Black Obelisk" is a consoling book for all time, I re-read it every time our poor country is afraid of another crisis, and money is washed away by the flow of inflation.

Our library has quite a few art books... but I wish I had many, many more! No e-book and pdf, of course, can replace an album. But these albums cost an infinite amount of money, and I'm not a millionaire. So, there are only seven Tachen albums in our library (light versions in paper covers): these are art biographies of Modigliani, Kandinsky, Gaudi, Paul Klee, Edvard Munch, Alfons Much, and a collective essay on the Dadaists.

We also have many other books from various fields of art, mostly biographies of artists, musicians, books about architecture. Most of the books were added to the library by my wife, and a smaller part by me.

This is sort of a "virtual" section ... I remember very well all the books that for one reason or another left me.

• "An unfinished portrait" by N.Valentinov (one of the best books about V.I. Lenin - not a biography, but a memoir + study of his contemporary). She disappeared from my house in a way unknown to me, probably someone took it to read ... and did not return. I'm still waiting for her to come back, but this is probably the case when you have to buy another copy already.
• 'Slowly downward' by Stanley Donwood - I gave this book to my girlfriend to read, and she left forever with the girlfriend. The first English edition... you can't buy it now for $3 - a bibliographic rarity!
• 'Art of a Book. Essays' - I bought this book while studying at the institute, a thick, very luxuriously illustrated album ... I lended it to one student girl, supposed to help in her work, and then ... a few years later the story was buried under miles of dust. It happens often.

lost and found

I could write a whole post about it - stories about books found by chance, abandoned, picked up on the street, garbage dump, or elsewhere, or even stolen/borrowed by me...for a while, of course. Books that I did not buy, but which came to me on their own. Once I witnessed how a book was thrown out of the window, it did not fall on my head but flew by, I picked it up and added it to my library, it was a cheap SF pocketbook "Alien Heat" by Michael Moorcock ... but that would be a totally different story to tell. A lot of stories, actually.

my fave book