Bookshelf Pictures

I have noticed a number of people during the quarantine are posting pictures of their bookshelves. This seemed like something I could do, and I psyched myself up for the task by saying that if other people's bookshelves are of interest to the internet reading public, surely mine must be to someone. My bookcases are scattered over several rooms throughout the house and are not terribly organized, but there are some basic themes running through them.

1 & 2. This is the main bookcase of the house, and the largest, in what is now something of a front sitting room, where the children practice their musical instruments and there is a round table in the middle where people could read books and newspapers if anyone did such things anymore. The first photo is the left side of this bookcase. It has a number of St. John's books in it, including a set of the Great Books itself across the top. You can see a few Harvard Classics, though I don't make an especial point of collecting those, next to the Anthony Powells on the third shelf from the bottom. There are also a few Norton Anthologies and Foreign Language dictionaries and other reference books here. The bottom two shelves are for kind of small books with ugly covers that can fit on them.

The right side of this bookcase. On the top is the set of I.W.E. encyclopedias whose reading list forms the basis of my other blog. Just below that is the eclectic "World's Greatest Literature" set from the 30s which I have had since I was a teenager (I am still missing 2 of the set of 20 though). The bottom shelf contains a bunch of atlases and large art and travel picture books that no one looks at anymore, including me, though most of these I have had since my childhood/young adulthood and I used to look at them all the time. The third row from the top is where I stick all of my clunky clothbound 900 page 1950s era books.

3. This is in the living room. The television (not visible) sits on top of this. This bookcase was in my grandparents' basement forever, and it appears in family pictures going back at least to the 1940s, before they moved to the house they lived in when I knew them. When they had it it was full of bestsellers and book of the month club selections, which I didn't keep. I preserve it exclusively for hardcover books, mostly literature, printed, if not necessarily written, from the 20s to the 50s. There are a lot of my Modern Library books in here, including most of the "Giants", though I don't on the whole make a point of keeping all of those together.

4. Also in the living room, though in somewhat of a dark corner. This is probably the nicest bookcase I have, as a piece of furniture. This holds mostly smaller Modern Library books with one shelf of Loeb Classics and a few other old similarly shaped classic type books, small blue Oxford editions and the like. The radio on top was my grandfather's, AM only. He used to listen to it in his basement in the 70s, and presumably had been doing so for years before that, in the afternoons when he drank beer. Sometime in the early 80s he got cable TV down there and didn't listen to the radio as much in the afternoons anymore. At some point within the last decade I plugged it in to listen to the baseball games before I gave in and paid for my sons to be able to watch them on TV, and it stilled worked. It's very loud and clear actually, and the static had that whirligig 1950s time capsule quality.

5. The whatnot. This is a pretty starchy set of literary classics that my wife found set out in a box by the side of a woodland road some years back. Most of the volumes are things I either already have or am probably never going to read, though there are a couple that I might use someday. In truth at the time I think she likely got them with this piece of furniture in mind, and they do contribute something to the dignity of the room.

6. This cabinet is built into the wall in the corner of the dining room, and was probably intended to display cups and dishes. I keep a lot of my newer paperbacks in here, Penguin Classics and the like, as well as other newer (post-1990) sets, the Oxford Illustrated Dickens and Jane Austen sets are here, and newer Modern Library and Everyman's. The first four volumes of Knausgaard are here. I liked those enough that I would like to get around to finishing the series, which I have now had a several years' hiatus from, someday. There are a number of late 90s/early 2000s era tourist guidebooks here as well which I am not quite ready to get rid of yet, though it might be a substantial step forward in my development to do so.

7. This is kind of an extra shelf of my wife's in the front hallway. Her Greek and Latin collection is here along with a bunch of her occupational binders and notebooks.

8. On the staircase landing. Mostly old children's books on the top two shelves that none of my children have ever read, but that I am holding onto just in case either of my daughters, now 5 and 8, should take an interest in them. The third shelf has a motley collection of serious books (I see Ulysses, and a Euclid, and The Great Gatsby and maybe Hemingway) that are either second copies or couldn't be fit in anywhere else. The bottom shelf are photo albums, which we stubbornly kept up making with film prints up to about 2010, after which we succumbed to modernity. 

9. Another extra shelf in the ill-lit, narrow upstairs hallway. I had to reach out my hand against the opposite wall just to get a blurry partial picture. This has a lot of second copies of St John's books, gift books I've never read, gifts I've gotten my children that they've never read, a Smiths biography, a circa-2000 guide to literary agents that I have no idea why I am still keeping. The most disorderly shelf in the house.

10. A small shelf in my bedroom that contains movie/entertainment books, sports books, school yearbooks, travel guidebooks that even predate the ones downstairs, notebooks with my manuscripts from when I used to write, my wife's St. John's manuals--even I did not keep those.

11 & 12. These are boxes piled up in the sitting room with books I have no shelf space for. A lot of them are full of children's books that people have gleefully dumped on us over the books and that frankly I think we are going to have to get rid of, though around three or four of them are the books I got in New York last summer and that I need to be able to see because I cannot remember what is there, and I have already ordered one book this spring from the internet that I had forgotten I had on hand because I couldn't see it. 

The new shelf is going to be in this corner. It is supposed to be one of our quarantine projects. My wife has great plans for the design and paint scheme. I honestly just want to be able to see the books. I don't care what color the shelves are.

I am of course having a lot of mixed, inconsistent, what have you, opinions regarding the ongoing pandemic lockdown, though if I were to try to write about them tonight I wouldn't be able to get this posted, so I won't do it tonight. I am as usual unable to be in complete lockstep agreement, not least emotionally, with the educated east coast people, though God knows I would be so much happier if I could think and feel as intensely and clearly and rightly as they do, and go to bed every night knowing I was one of those lucky guys that the angry liberal women I have always loved were not angry at, but held up as a one in a thousand example of righteous progressive virtue. "That Bourgeois Surrender...he gets it," they would sigh with perhaps a barely perceptible heaving of the bosom as they lifted the wine glass to...yes, well I had better stop and explain myself more clearly in a future post...

Tourism Nostalgia Part 2

There was going to be a series of these posts. I was going to include all of my favorite pictures, and make some kind of personal claim on the places in them, and make some reference to the overcrowding and other vulgar changes brought about in them by our modern age, if I could not quite join in on the lamenting of them. Now of course the crowds are gone from all of these places, perhaps never to return in the numbers that had become common in recent years, which of course would be a positive development, other that it may further decrease the chance of my ever going to any of them again. The photos in this group are from the second volume of the Catholic history survey, which covers the Western story from 1600 to about 1960, so the sites are more modern. They loaded from my phone somewhat out of order, but that does not matter enough that I am going to bother fixing it. 

The scene around the Arch of Triumph doesn't look that different from the old days, at least from the air, though the Elysian Fields I guess has been effectively Times Square for at least forty years now. It's still too iconic a site to leave out of the post.



Brilon, Westphalia, Germany



I admit that I don't know anything about this place, but the old scene at least reminds me of the kind of town in the Czech Republic that we would ride into on our bicycles and drink beer and eat soup and wiener schnitzel in. Which I loved.

Church of St Peter and St Paul, St. Petersburg

Everything looks so clean and restored nowadays. So many experts and culture lovers swarming over and caring for everything. I think I miss the days when everything was neglected and run down and I could imagine I, and a few other earnest and sexy but not especially enterprising people, were the only ones who really cared about all of this stuff.

The view from the other side still has some trees in the picture, but all of the ones I've been able to find aren't allowing me to steal them.

Such a big deal was made of the U.N. in all of my childhood reference books, and it seems so comparatively passe and not a big part of where the world is going now, that I have always kind of wanted to go visit it, especially while it is still an active organization. However I haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

I should note here that this was the very last photograph in the book, the most up-to-date representation of Western Civilization as it appeared in 1962. 

Wall Street, 1929. Probably more crowded then than now.



I can remember walking past Wall Street but I don't think I have ever been on it. It is one place I definitely don't belong anyway, but at the time (I was still in my 20s) I'm sure I felt like I couldn't go there, that somehow I would be exposing myself to existential danger (my upbringing to that point had instilled in me an idea that Wall Street was one of the vortexes of evil in all the world to a would-be artist or serious thinker).

Osnabruck. Another one of these German places from the Thirty Years' War that I do not know that much about but would probably be interested in

That's the place. It is one of my weaknesses, and probably the major real cause of my dissatisfaction thus far with the whole coronavirus episode, that there is all this fun to be had out there in the world that I have largely missed out on, or that I am constantly being prevented from taking part in, in which European and big city traveling plays an outsized part, especially now that I am too old to go partying in places like Ibiza or Thailand or the more decadent Greek Islands. While it is true, as my wife would argue, that spending all your afternoons and evenings lounging around drinking beer even in the most picturesque setting would be a waste of your life, it is also true that some of the happier memories of my life involved doing just this. And as it's been over 20 years now since I have been able to indulge myself in this way I do have a hankering to do it again (as I have a hankering to see a real classic or good adult movie in an actual cinema, or even an auditorium again, which I haven't done in 20 years either). 

In 1990, on my first trip abroad, I did go up in the Eiffel Tower like a typical chump, however I did manage to strike up a conversation with a couple of really beautiful Israeli girls on this occasion. They were in truth such a leap up in glamor from anyone who had ever talked to me on a friendly basis up to that time that I unfortunately was not quite ready to follow through with laying out some appealing post-Eiffel Tower plans that might interest them, as I didn't haven't any, though they did give me an opening to bring the subject up. At the time I thought, well, I was caught off-guard this time, but the next time I find myself chatting up such babes at one of these tourist attractions, I'll be prepared. Of course I never would find myself chatting up any such babes at any tourist attraction or anywhere else ever again.   

How it really is.

How we imagine it (below)

League of Nations Building, Geneva. The idea of international organizations, provided they were Western-dominated, had a hold on the imagination of leaders and educated men in the decades following World War II, even when they were epic failures.

This building still exists, and looks about the same as it did in past days. The inside of it looks to have something of an old European grandeur that the present U.N. lacks (though I also have a certain weakness, entirely rooted in nostalgia, for 1950s American modernism).

Admittedly, this place was built to hold crowds, and attract even the dregs of humanity (to some extent). I love it there, and the whole area around it. A lot of excitement.

Red Square, long view.



I know I have no place to be a snob, but Red Square isn't quite the same now that people who shop at Whole Foods can go there (and come back again to their office park jobs a few days later).



Modern cameras, or perhaps modernity itself, seems to have diminished the effect that many of these monuments have in these old photos.

Maison Lafitte, France

French castles are not one of my particular areas of expertise. 

May Day Parade, Red Square Again!

These epic events did end after 1991 (there is still a military parade on May 9 every year to commemorate the end of World War II), but there was an (apparently?) one-time revival in 2014 that drew 10,000 people.

This Catholic history textbook I got all these pictures from unabashedly hated the International Communist Party and all that they stood for and didn't skip any opportunity to excoriate them in print.

Palace of Versailles

I haven't actually been here. When the crowd is this big, we're all tourist scum, unless maybe you are really good-looking. I hope there is some time of year when it isn't like this. 

St Martin's-in-the-Fields, London. 



This is the church that is right off Trafalgar Square, across the street from the National Gallery, so I have seen it, but I haven't visited it. Due to its location and the fortune of its not having been bombed out during World War II (which fate befell a great many of the 17th and 18th century London churches recognizable to students of English literature) it is one of the most prominent 18th century buildings remaining in the city.

Belvedere Palace, Vienna. 



I have been to a number of the secondary palaces of the Hapsburg family, including Franz Ferdinand's cottage at Konopiste in Bohemia, and Franz Joseph's hunting lodge in Bad Ischl, but I have never made it to Vienna. The treeless, relatively unadorned approach to the gigantic Viennese palaces (Schonbrunn presents similarly in photos) has always struck me as strange, but perhaps the effect is different in person. 

I don't know how to end these kinds of posts, so I'm just going to say "This is the end."