![]() ![]() Several years ago the Christian public intellectual, Russell Moore, gave his readers a tour of his substantial home library that demonstrates this point. You’ll never reread that old book for the first time, but revisiting a copy on your shelf can help you recapture a memory-just like finding an old photo or replaying a favorite song. ![]() When I see Giles Milton’s Nathaniel’s Nutmeg or Barry Cunliffe’s The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, I see moments that opened my imagination about trade and world history, which remain passions to this day.īooks trigger transformation in our lives, and keeping a copy allows us to access those moments for all sorts of reasons: self-exploration, renewed excitement, gratitude, ongoing curiosity, and more. When I see, for instance, Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies, I recognize a formative voice in my intellectual development, one that helps explain my current attitudes about innovation, free inquiry, and economic growth. “There are,” as legendary Johns Hopkins professor Richard Macksey once said, “little bits of yourself that are scattered around the library.” This is all the more so because books are very often the catalysts for the very turns and transitions to which they testify. It’s the same with glancing down my shelves.Ī personal library is, among other things, a map of where we’ve been, a track through time that helps us understand the way we’ve come. When I hear Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream” I’m suddenly behind the wheel of my first car, a 1977 AMC Hornet, tooling around Northern California. Music can transport us through time to significant moments and periods of personal pain and joy, struggle and growth. I count at least five off the top of my head. No, I’d wager most of the book owners you know are like those I know, and probably like you or me: They own books for practical reasons any serious reader would recognize. If there are any who fit that bill, I bet they’re few in number. But just think of all the book owners you know. You can buy books by the foot if you need. I’m sure there are people who do own books to make themselves look smart. And none possesses books to brag about them, or as a replacement for their personality, or on the mistaken belief they might magically accrue knowledge by osmosis. (Is that supposed to be a bad thing?) Only one is smug. No, I specifically mean having a lot of books and boasting about it, treating having a lot of books as a stand-in for your personality, or believing that simply owning a lot of books makes one ‘know things.’”īut, seriously: Who does that? I know plenty of people who own plenty of books. Writing in the Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett recently took aim at “everything that is smug and middle class about the cult of book ownership.” She clarified, “I don’t mean reading. But, then, why does anyone collect books? You can find opinions on the question some are better than others. What compelled the man to build such a massive library? No one knows, not even his wife. ![]() Schröder has equipped the sloping ceilings with shelves, which now contain around 12,000 books, all neatly sorted by publisher.” How do the books stay up while facing the ground at an angle? Shelf-wide strips of bracing prevent the tomes from tumbling. “The most amazing pieces of furniture,” said Kleinhubbert, “can be found in the attic. Schröder designed and built the shelving himself. ![]() From the basement to the attic, entire walls of books divide rooms filled with more books. “Schröder’s home has something labyrinthine about it,” reported Guido Kleinhubbert for Der Spiegel. Had they crossed the threshold, however, they would have seen floor-to-ceiling shelves-some ingeniously built into the ceilings themselves-filled with pretty much everything but romance novels, which Schröder disliked. Behind the doors of his small house in the northwest German town of Mettingen, he assembled a library of 70,000 books-one of the largest personal libraries in the entire country.įew of his neighbors knew what he’d built. When Bruno Schröder died at 88, the retired German engineer left an enormous mystery. ![]()
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