Thanks to a meme on Facebook (which I discovered courtesy of a Mr A. S. of London) I have discovered a Japanese word that could and should be appropriated into what King Alfred called Englisc. That word is tsundoku and its definition is as follows:
(n.) the act of buying books and not reading them and/or letting books pile up unread on shelves or floors or nightstands.
Guilty as charged, Officer, and I’d like for the Court to take into consideration this panoramic picture of the Library des Girrafes, taken just now…
… from which you can see that I’m a Black Belt in tsundoku.
Working as I do for a publishing company, I am liable to accrete books as easily as breathing. It’s hard to walk through the offices of Your Favourite Weekly Professional Science Magazine Beginning With N and not pick up a book, in the way that Canis secundus croxorum picks up fleas.
Canis secundus croxorum, recently (fleas not pictured)
Apart from occasional mad sprees in places like Hay on Wye, I was once fastidious about books, and selective in what I brought home. Working, as I have said, for a publishing company, it’s easy to get blasé about books. So, in the days when Mrs Crox and I thought of moving house as an enjoyable pastime – in the same way that some people really get a kick out of base jumping, free running or the Iron Man triathalon – I used to fill up Caroline the eVolvo with books, drive to the local lending library and offload them. Believe me whan I tell you that Caroline the eVolvo is extraordinarily capacious.
Being rational, I thought, books are just books, right? Most stand unread on the shelves (or the floor, or the bedside, or behind the sofa, next to the bath, on top of the fishtank and so on and so forth in like fashion) – and if read once, are rarely likely to be read again. If I really wanted to consult a book, I told myself, I could always borrow one from the library, or look up the relevant passage online, or even upload it to my iPad. Right?
Well, no. Having gotten rid of books, I sometimes (though not always) regretted having done so. I regret, for example, having sloughed off all the great SF I read when I was a teenager, and now scour secondhand bookstores, charity shops, car boot sales and so on in search of my old friends.
I’m also having a fit of medieval literature.
So it was that Saturday found me in a secondhand bookshop in Cromer that I’ve visited only once before – such is my restraint – and picked up Bill The Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison; The Day Of The Triffids and Web by John Wyndham; an edition of the Aeneid and Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy. Some of these I have read before – others I’d like to read someday, if I have the time, which I don’t. Notwithstanding inasmuch as which I found Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds and several hoary old tomes by the likes of Brian Aldiss and Robert Silverberg in Oxfam in Norwich, a few days earlier. In the Break charity shop in Cromer I found Anathem by Neal Stephenson. A few weeks ago in a shop in Holt I found Teach Yourself Old English, and in the wholly remarkable secondhand bookshop of Blicking Hall some weeks earlier I found a first-edition Silmarillion (having got rid of mine, fool that I am), and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. And so on.
It helps that subsequent to the extension and remodelling of the Maison Des Girrafes I have space for a library, which I never had before. Conversely, there’s no such thing as having too many books – just not enough space to put them.
Tsundoku, welcome to my life.
Guilty on this one too.
*He said, surrounded by piles of books on the floor*
BTW, I’ve never read Boethius, but the Consolations of Philosophy is much cited in an old favourite read of mine, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.
Also guilty to collecting the Tolkien hardback editions when I chance across them in junk shops. And once got a nice 3-vol hardback set of the LoTR (w dustcovers, even) at the kids’ school fete.
Three-volume set of the hardback LOTR – envy. But silly me, I had a nice set once … and gave them away. I thought I might dip into Boethius as he’s mentioned extensively in Tom Shippey’s books about Tolkien, and Consolations i a book known to have been translated into Englisc by King Alfred, or under his direction.
We at the Menagerie haev the same problem – the bedroom is stuffed with books, double-shelved. Ask GrrlScientist to take a photo (if the birds agree to being moved).
BTW, a acouple of years ago I was in Leeds with Grrl, so dragged her into the heart of Headingley to go to Bookside (I assume it was there when you were there too – just of Brudenell Rd, Hyde Park). The rotters had knocked it down. For me it was the quintissential bookshop, the one place where Plato’s world coincides with his shadows on the wall – almost no windows, and floor to ceiling with books, mainly cheap paperbacks that students could afford. The sort of place you would find Hoffnung’s cartoons, or Beachcomber’s books stacked in a pile waiting to inflict 12 red beared dwarves playing a tuba.
*sigh*
I don’t remember ‘Bookside’, but I have been in quite a few shops just like that in which you can simply lose yourselves among books.
I’m almost relieved to find that there is a word for it, although those I have shared accommodation with over the years have introduced me to several – very descriptive and rather rude – names for the habit…
But why – WHY – have you told everyone about the superb secondhand bookshop at Blickling Hall? I’d hoped to keep it as a family secret…
Apologies… I won’t tell anyone else. Felbrigg Hall has quite a good secondhand bookshop, too. Not as good as Blickling, but still pretty good.
Yup, I picked up some nice regional geologies there last time I was in the Cromer environs… Happy days…
I look at my library as a “tool of epistemic modesty”:
Libraries, a reminder of how little we know
Thanks for that link, Dave. I suppose you know Borges’ Library of Babel…?
Yes, I have read “The Library of Babel,” Henry. By the way, it’s possible that a (perhaps) distant relative of mine provided some inspiration to Mr Borges:
The story repeats the theme of Borges’s 1939 essay “The Total Library” (“La biblioteca total”), which in turn acknowledges the earlier development of this theme by Kurd Lasswitz in his 1901 story “The Universal Library” (“Die Universalbibliothek”):
The Library of Babel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mr Borges wrote “Ramón Llull’s Thinking Machine” (1937), which can be found in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger; translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999), pp. 155-159. But I’ve yet to read that essay.
Visited Alok Jha at the Grauniad a few weeks ago. He was desperate for us to take some of his review copies (that he hadn’t read).
I know how he feels. The offices of Your Favourite Weekly Professional Science Magazine Beginning With N are absolutely deluged with review copies, and every so often we editors are allowed to snarfle a few. Some of these books are incredibly recondite, especially the symposium volumes. I remember seeing on the reject shelves a big book called Activated Sludge. As I recall it was brown, but my memory might be playing tricks here.
I think I’ve seen the movie version of that!
Quote from Julian Barnes in this week’s Guardian Weekly:
I still buy book faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life.
I remembered my library 2 weeks ago and am re-reading the Naked Ape by Desmond Morris in Spanish, it seems to me that is already obsolete in his ideas.
As a good librarian, I strive for a steady-state or at least something approaching that. Every year or two I take a good look through the shelves and think “Do I really ever want to read that again?” or “Does that really look like it is worth reading?” and then fill up a couple of bags to go to the charity shop. More recently I have developed a Kindle habit which is a great help on space-saving.
I haven’t ever really got the second-hand book bug, luckily.
In the not-too-distant future I am going to have to do an almighty big book clear-out.
A librarian immune to the bug of secondhand books. You have iron self-discipline, Sir.
I wonder about that. My local public library periodically clears out older stock, so perhaps librarians are trained in this?
(To be fair, many are damaged stock but they also turf books that simply are occupying space, in that few people are taking them out.)
Ohhhh, this has a name?! I feel so relieved to finally have a formal diagnosis!
There are shelves, stacks, and piles of unread books in my house. This is partially George RR Martin’s fault, because his books hogged my time for the first half of this year; partially the result of an excellent closing down sale at a local bookstore (that subsequently found a new owner and is in the process of restocking – hurrah!); and partially a bad case of chronic hereditary (on both sides of the family) tsundoku.
My excuse is that with a book piled (on shelf or floor) I only have to remenber the basic principle it explored and the jacket (perhaps the title and author at a pinch) – then I can always refer back for the detail. So there remains space in my small brain for reading more books. The problem is, with passing years there is less space in my flat for me and Pugsley the dog as my external hard drive fact storage system grows exponentially (is that the right word – I must look it up – now where exactly is that book with the green cover – something about maths – what was it called)
Guilty as charged, although the extension completed last year means that most of my books are now in one room. In my defence, I call that doyen of the detective novel: A C Doyle: “A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it” The Five Orange Pips
We, too, have suffered from that bug including the once a year secondhand book sale from hades or paradise depending on what you can still manage to fit on the shelves (floor, desk. other horizontal surfaces). 40,000 books to look at!!!
sigh
viv in nz
what does 40000 books look like?
And what about the 300,000 (out of 450,000) books that Larry McMurtry’s auctioning off from his Booked Up bookshop?:
‘Here’s What to Expect at Larry McMurtry’s 300,000-Volume “Last Book Sale”’
A whole theatre (The Regent in Dunedin) full of second hand books for 24 hours.
Or maybe permanent eye strain
You do have to discount all the Mills and Boone though. This happens every year just when winter begins. Good for elderly novels, general junk and a few real gems (and they keep topping up the benches too).
The Regent sale has a lot more than 40,000 books – closer to ten times that I believe.
I lost two boxes of books in a transatlantic crossing, and left behind about three in my last move. I don’t think I specifically *miss* having any of them, but I feel a sort of generalized hole in my heart at the thought of not having them in my life.
Alas, Family Rohn-Grant is officially out of bookshelf space. What to do?
‘Generalized hole’ in the heart – describes it very well. Many years ago when the world was young, me and Mrs Crox moved from my book-lined flat into our first house. About a year later I was looking for a particular book. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then I realized that there was an unopened box of books under the dining table we’d been kicking around for a year, which contained the desired volume.
I think you’ll find that bookshelf space, like time, is flexible.
Henry – that first-edition Silmarillion sounds as though it would be expensive… unless you scooped it for cheap?
Around about these parts, the University of Toronto’s colleges have book sales in September and October (usually, different days for each college). Full of wonderful things. I’m rather fond of early 1900′s leather-bound pocket editions of Dickens and the like, which seem to be fairly plentiful and quite cheap. I also bought a first-edition trade paperback of Generation X one year, which was fun.
Our local libraries often have a sell-off table too… when I lived in Toronto I once picked up a nearly-new, hardcover copy of John Irving’s A Son of the Circus, for a dollar or two, while it was still available brand new in the stores and before the paperback had even been issued!
@Jenny – I have no solution for your problem I’m afraid. I can still send you that DVD of The Score, but it sounds like it might cause your home to explode.
I just checked…. It’s the first edition, 1977, with dust jacket, and cost me … £2.50
Hm. Just looked at Amazon and it seems they’re changing hands for $30-$80 typically… not nearly as much as I’d thought. Still a steal for two and a half of your quids though.
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Another couple of things … I attended a conference in Charleston, SC, last winter. Across the street from the conference hotel was an ENORMOUS secondhand bookstore selling classic SF for very little. I stocked up. I remember another great store in Mountain View CA which I visited while at a conference at NASA Ames.
The most egregious tsundokouistes I ever knew were a senior academic – a botanist – and his wife who, having retired, and whose children had flown, needed to move house. They were looking for a seven-bedroom property in which five bedrooms would accommodate their book collection, gathered over a lifetime. The botanist had been collecting books about plants since he was a sprout and had never got rid of any of it.
I’m sure that if that store in Mountain View is still there, all the classic Sci-Fi will have been long depleted by the legions of Google employees.
I think I may have added to that depletion, in my own small way… (coughs). I arrived at SF with 22Kg of extra baggage allowance for the return trip…
Alejandro – what were you doing whwn you remebered your library? – I bet Frank doesn’t forget libraries.
Hi John,
I remembered my little library why read this article about Tsundoku. Also I’ve too much literature obsolete.
Sincerely,
AC
My bloke and I suffer from this condition. Well I say suffer, but actually, after comments made by a lady who once came to appraise our house ahead of a deep clean, I’m more likely to consider it to be a blessing. This lady simply couldn’t understand why we would want to fill our house with so many dust-attracting opportunities. Hilarious really!
For everyone on here who hasn’t yet been to the bookshop above the cafe on the high street in pretty little Llangollen, North Wales, I envy you your inaugural visit. Go there, discover it. I happened upon it quite by accident donkeys years ago, and pay a visit every time I’m in the area – which is not often – and it never changes. Unpretentious and ungentrified in every conceivable way. You go up some creaking wooden stairs inside the caff, to find high-ceilinged rooms with towers and shelves of beautiful dusty old books : http://www.cafeandbooks.co.uk/#
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