Book Hoarding

I've frequently been spending weekends looking at book listings and reviews. Yesterday I signed up to as many publisher mailing lists as I could think of, but I suppose a lot of them are inconsistent with mailing lists or just forget about them altogether.

What Valancourt does on goodreads is a good model of how a publisher might keep readers informed.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time looking over Black Coat's dizzying output, considering how interested I might be in the catalogue of Newcon Press, reading lots of reviews on SFinTranslation and then getting caught up again in reading old controversies.

My reading goals seem more delusional when I consider how long it takes to even browse all these books!

If I had read all my anthologies years ago maybe there would be more authors I would have ruled out by now. But you can never tell if you've only read the weaker side of someone's work.
 
I appear to have been mixing up Raphus and Mount Abraxas Press. Can you buy Abraxas books anywhere but Ziesings? Not that I'll ever be able to afford them.
 
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ToALonelyPeace said:
Robert Adam Gilmour said:
I appear to have been mixing up Raphus and Mount Abraxas Press. Can you buy Abraxas books anywhere but Ziesings? Not that I'll ever be able to afford them.
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You can purchase directly from them through email: exoccidente@gmail.com
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So, as best I can tell, Mount Abraxas is an imprint/rebranding/sister company of Ex Occidente. Historically, I've seen it sold by only two retailers: Ziesings (US) and Cold Tonnage (UK). But as To A Lonely Peace mentions, your best bet is to buy from the publisher directly. In my experience, he's been very responsive to email inquiries. His editorial legacy speaks for itself.
 
In my experience, he's been very responsive to email inquiries. His editorial legacy speaks for itself.

I wish to second Ucasuni on this. Dan Ghetu has been creating a remarkable legacy through his Ex Occidente press and Mount Abraxas imprint (also including the former Ex Occidente partnership with Zagava).

These books are true works of art, and the written work of these authors, many hard-to-find elsewhere, are a unique contribution to literature. I only wish Des Lewis was still posting here as his reviews of Ex Occidente works are superlative.

I hope that you do connect directly with this press! One of the very best.
 
Undeserving kind words. Thank you.

The books are officially distributed by Simon Gosden at Fantastic Literature (UK) and by Mark Ziesing at Ziesing Books (US). I have a long standing relationship with both these gentlemen. I am sure they will be glad to help any of you with any Mount Abraxas / Ex Occidente Press recent titles.
 
Robert Adam Gilmour said:
Some of my reading goals, possibly impossible...

- All the Gollancz Masterworks books (even if it's not the actual Gollancz edition) and most of the Gollancz Gateway Omnibus books.
- All the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line and all the books/stories even considered for the line (as with the Gollancz line, I don't mind if it's an edition by a different publisher).
- All Snuggly books and maybe all Chomu?
- All modern Tartarus authors.
- Most of Blackcoat's translations of French books.
- A good lot of Dedalus, but all the anthologies.
- A good lot of Haikasoru and Kurodahan.
- Try a book by each author published by Hippocampus.
- A good chunk of Valancourt's horror/speculative reprints.
- Try a collection by each Word Horde author.
- A good lot of Undertow's books.
- Read every diversity/social group anthology or magazine I can find.
- Get everything I can by Egaeus.
- A ton of small press magazines.
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Add to this trying all of Immanion's fiction authors, Norliana, Small Beer Press, Wakefield Press and Eibonvale Press.
 
Books, books, books. Whatever do we do with them? We do not re-read most of them (too many others waiting for attention). We do not give them away or pass them on. Selling feels a bit like sacrilege (unless one disliked the book) and so they sit on the shelf, waiting. For what? My death, so they can be boxed up and shipped off to some donation center? For me to move and face a whopping fee to transport hundreds of pounds of pulp? To collapse on me, creating a temporary tomb (my preferred way to go).
Sometimes I feel my living space would be better without books: clearer, more minimalistic. But I would miss them so.
 
Revenant said:
Books, books, books. Whatever do we do with them? We do not re-read most of them (too many others waiting for attention). We do not give them away or pass them on. Selling feels a bit like sacrilege (unless one disliked the book) and so they sit on the shelf, waiting. For what?
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For you to re-read when you get old, and current books are of less interest.
 
Joyless

In my early twenties, I had the notion of assembling my own "library."
Classics, art books, histories, reference works, etc ...
What one would see in movies set in the stately manor.
Folly, what with the public library, and later internet.
Still I did buy, and continue to buy, books that beckoned.

Behavior I find puzzling, I am now witnessing in my supposedly rational female friends and relatives.
There is an almost manic craze for tidying, jettisoning possessions that no longer "spark joy."
Decluttering.
For so many, that means clearing the bookshelves to a Zen-like state.
Many, I have had to plead with - "Don't throw the books out in the trash! Donate to your library, give to a retirement home, drop off at the Salvation Army."
Someone will value those castoffs.
This is the polar opposite of hoarding, and it saddens me.
I wonder how many will regret their actions in a couple of years.
 
Re: Joyless

Zaharoff said:
In my early twenties, I had the notion of assembling my own "library."
Classics, art books, histories, reference works, etc ...
What one would see in movies set in the stately manor.
Folly, what with the public library, and later internet.
Still I did buy, and continue to buy, books that beckoned.

Behavior I find puzzling, I am now witnessing in my supposedly rational female friends and relatives.
There is an almost manic craze for tidying, jettisoning possessions that no longer "spark joy."
Decluttering.
For so many, that means clearing the bookshelves to a Zen-like state.
Many, I have had to plead with - "Don't throw the books out in the trash! Donate to your library, give to a retirement home, drop off at the Salvation Army."
Someone will value those castoffs.
This is the polar opposite of hoarding, and it saddens me.
I wonder how many will regret their actions in a couple of years.
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I doubt they will regret it since minimalism is in fashion right now. It's a pain to move or get rid of physical books. Many like the idea that they have millions of books at their disposal, and they only have to push the download button to read one. I would switch to reading on the tablet or kindle if not for my issues of decreased reading speed and increased impatience. Also people don't often steal books, but they will steal those devices.
 
Minimalism is a fascinating idea that I did look into at one point. But I simply cannot be a minimalist when it comes to books. Everything else, yes. In fact, give me a bed, a comfortable chair, a CD player, and walls crammed with books and I think I'd be perfectly content.
 
Obituary of Madeline Kripke (sister of the philosopher Saul Kripke), "who kept one of the world’s largest private collection of dictionaries [20,000 volumes], much of it crammed into her Greenwich Village apartment." Follow the link and scroll down to see an amazing picture of her apartment:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/nyregion/madeline-kripke-dead-coronavirus.html

This was not mindless collecting:

She was self-taught as a lexicographer. “She approached her collection and study with the same scholarship and discipline with which her father approached religion,” said Tom Dalzell, a slang expert, “and with which her brother approaches modal logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and recursion theory.”

Jesse Sheidlower, a former editor at the “Oxford English Dictionary,” said of Ms. Kripke, “She didn’t just accumulate material; she read it all, and could tell you the editor’s personality based on the changes made across varying editions of a work."
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And here is a longer profile/interview with more pictures of her collection: https://narratively.com/the-dame-of-dictionaries/

Sheidlower recalled when he first met her at the beginning of his career twenty years ago. He had heard about her but didn’t know much and asked about a particular dictionary he thought was hard to get. She not only had numerous editions but even offered a complete discourse on it.

“I thought she’d have lots of copies of all these common things, but I had no idea that she was a better library than the Library of Congress,” he said. “And that was then. Now it’s that much better still.”
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And I can't resist adding this:

“Any book that I want to have near me that’s new goes into in the bedroom first,” she says. These titles command a sizable share of real estate on her queen-size bed. “There’s a little strip of vacant land for me to sleep on. It’s no way to live, but until I part with some of the books or store some away from the apartment, that’s it for now.”
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Robert Adam Gilmour said:
My reading goals seem more delusional when I consider how long it takes to even browse all these books!
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I was looking at my written wishlists and adding the most important things to amazon wishlist again and I thought "I need to take a break before I enter the rest, maybe I'll spread this over the next two days"!

But I'm buying less books.

A couple of weeks ago I looked through all my books to get the priority books established. There's still some comics that I have no idea if I still want to read them and I don't want to get rid of them until I'm sure.

Some stuff I regret buying: Russell Kirk's Ancestral Shadows (I thought the one story I've read is just okay) and Oliver Onions (I've liked 2 or 3 of his stories well enough, but do I need this huge book of them?) But I won't get rid of them unless I'm really not enjoying them if I ever get around to them.
 
When I look at authors I'm particularly interested in, I often say to myself "I'll read all their books eventually", but this is looking increasingly optimistic and unreal. So too that idea of keeping up with the small presses I'm most interested in.

How many authors do you manage, try to or realistically plan to read their complete works? Is it folly for a regular reader to try to be completist about many authors who written 50-100 books?

I'm still keen on being completist about SP Somtow and Tanith Lee.

Does any of you keep up with many fiction magazines online and offline?
 
I have had a few temporary insanity episodes I pared down my book collection a bit too much. Where, for example, I brought 2 big bags to the library to donate, when, had I been more discerning, I should have just brought one small one. Of course, I don't regret all of these (letting go of mass market paperbacks never bothers me, and I do prefer to get rid of books that I have strong feelings against for whatever reason, like Sartre's "Nausea".), but there are a few that strike me as sheer madness in retrospect. I actually donated a first edition set of Thomas Mann's multi-volume "Joseph and His Brothers" (Which had a beautiful personalized dedication in exquisite calligraphy), simply because I had just purchased James Wood's more recent translation. Yet how much I've regretted that ever since!

Still, it is kind of funny. I only know perhaps one person in the real world with even a vague appreciation for books and literature. So I read pretty much for myself alone. There's nothing wrong with that, and it's even a noble thing in it's way. But it would be nice to have someone to discuss it all with on occasion. However, the ignorance of the average American today is pretty staggering. I saw a survey not so long ago that detailed how 30 percent of American adults actually think that the sun revolves around the earth rather than vice versa! (Really, how is this even possible? How can a person live so incuriously for 45 years as to not know such a basic fact of existence?) A similar survey showed that less than 5 percent of the adult population in this country reads a single book a year after college, even when "book" is defined so generously as to include Oprah Winfrey's list of top cookbooks. When these are your neighbors (70 million of whom voted for Trump, good grief.), I guess it's to be expected that literature and book collecting will always remain solitary pursuits.
 
Pan Michael said:
I have had a few temporary insanity episodes I pared down my book collection a bit too much. Where, for example, I brought 2 big bags to the library to donate, when, had I been more discerning, I should have just brought one small one. Of course, I don't regret all of these (letting go of mass market paperbacks never bothers me, and I do prefer to get rid of books that I have strong feelings against for whatever reason, like Sartre's "Nausea".), but there are a few that strike me as sheer madness in retrospect. I actually donated a first edition set of Thomas Mann's multi-volume "Joseph and His Brothers" (Which had a beautiful personalized dedication in exquisite calligraphy), simply because I had just purchased James Wood's more recent translation. Yet how much I've regretted that ever since!

Still, it is kind of funny. I only know perhaps one person in the real world with even a vague appreciation for books and literature. So I read pretty much for myself alone. There's nothing wrong with that, and it's even a noble thing in it's way. But it would be nice to have someone to discuss it all with on occasion. However, the ignorance of the average American today is pretty staggering. I saw a survey not so long ago that detailed how 30 percent of American adults actually think that the sun revolves around the earth rather than vice versa! (Really, how is this even possible? How can a person live so incuriously for 45 years as to not know such a basic fact of existence?) A similar survey showed that less than 5 percent of the adult population in this country reads a single book a year after college, even when "book" is defined so generously as to include Oprah Winfrey's list of top cookbooks. When these are your neighbors (70 million of whom voted for Trump, good grief.), I guess it's to be expected that literature and book collecting will always remain solitary pursuits.
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Pan Michael you have no idea HOW MUCH I empathize with what you wrote. It's like existing in a world filled with silence. It's beautiful and terrible simultaneously.
 
If one were to select a country to live in based on what its readers are like, you might consider some of these statistics (but some of these articles are getting a bit old). Literacy rates and number of enthusiastic readers being a very different thing, especially with Thailand.
Finland ranked world's most literate nation | Books | The Guardian
Which Countries Read the Most? - WorldAtlas
BBC NEWS | South Asia | Indians 'world's biggest readers'

I had heard Australia was a good country of readers, but that was Terry Dowling saying that in the 90s.
 
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