Amid said cleaning, I paused at the bookshelf. I generally hate to part with books, but sometimes you have to make room for new acquisitions. In the process, though, I happened to flip again through one of my favorite collections of essays by Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris). In one, she writes:
"It has been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection reveals a good deal about its owner... My own Odd Shelf holds sixty-four books about polar exploration: expedition narratives, journals, collections of photographs, works of natural history, and naval manuals.
"My interest is a lonely one. I cannot trot it out at cocktail parties... Reading in bed I will say to George, "Did you know that on Scott's first Antarctic expedition, Edward Wilson got up at one and five every morning to premasticate seal meat and stuff it down the throat of the pet emperor penguin chick he had captured on the Great Ice Barrier?" George will grunt. He is a rainforest man himself..."
Mine would be anything plague and pestilence -- fiction, non-fiction, essay, drama, narrative, etc. (I do, however, trot it out at cocktail parties. This is probably not coming as a surprise to anyone who knows me.)
So, do you have an Odd Shelf? What's on yours?
2 comments:
I don't have the space for an odd shelf, but if I did. It would probably a collection of 20th century novels. London, Vonnegut, Chrichton, Morrison, Asimov, Frank Herbert, etc. It would be my favorite shelf by far.
For me, however, I think it's the one everyone else would like too.
Mmm, thinking about what's on our odd shelf... Bryce's includes books on bird watching and mine... probably any book that looks good and OLD. :) Just call me an archivist, I guess...
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