Library Thing

(As though I needed another reason to not-write.)

Illya introduced me to LibraryThing, an online community built around a cataloguing application. You list the books on your shelves, others list theirs, and you look over one another's shoulders. I've always been one to put a lot of stock in the books I see in friends' libraries, as insight into both the friends and the books, so it makes sense I would be drawn to a site that allows construction of personae out of nothing but loaded bookcases.

My bibliophilia undoubtedly began in my father's bookshop (buy books here), where even my pre-literate self coveted the precious objects, a green cloth Hobbit with flame-colored dragon cover rising readily to mind, the treasure beneath flaring nostrils a poor approximation of, I supposed rightly, the riches within. That edition sits, read and reread but more than reading material, on a child-eye high shelf among other classics of my elementary days, just beneath Stevens' Palm at the End of the Mind and Berryman's Dream Songs.

"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?"
--Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting"

(This blog has an inordinate number of quotations collected from Benjamin; fitting, I suppose, as he was such a collector himself.)

You can find my books listed under the name hangedloneloon; the catalogue is far from complete, but growing.