The great cache of gardening books must find a home. If I shelve them separately then I must start a non-fiction section by subject, organized within by specialism; Dewey looms.
But are gardens only earth and plants and soil and water and sky? Can they too be imaginary worlds like novels, filled with familiar characters? Should I shelve Mazes with formal detective stories, or Seasonal Undertakings with sad, autumnal Anita Brookner novels, or slide rose pruning alongside A Summer Birdcage?
Attractive, indeed rational as it seems, I have decided retrieval must be the first criterion ; non-fiction shelves by subject with internal divisions. Those who have recently compiled indexes may have to come to the aid of the Library.
8 comments:
how are the internal divisions going to be jusxtaposed? alphabetically or thematically?
i was just wondering whether cooking and gardening should be close together. but maybe all cookery books will live separately in the kitchen?
or maybe some of the non-fiction could be in themed locations, like the gardening in the limonaia.
i see how there are many category decisions to be made: an exercise in ontology.
What, and books on plant propagation under porn??? Retrieval must be not the first but the only criterion, you might as well throw away a book instead of placing it in a hard-to-retrieve spot. All gardening books in a handy single place please. Cookery books in the kitchen, but gardening books NOT in the garden, it tends to get damp.
I suggest you get a stamp saying "READING THIS BOOK MAY BORE YOU TO DEATH" and stamp all of Anita Brookner with it. You must get occasional very boring guests, or it must have been a great relief for them to dump l'hotel du lac on you.
Lenna. themes, I think. Authors are not a good criterion for gardening practice. But perhaps seasons of the year, or techniques, or design as opposed to maintenance. I feel a line as opposed to colour moment and I'm not near the books on visual arts yet. I think I'll go and grill the dinner as there's a glowing fire.
Pispolo, It is not my fault books are found bedraggled in the garden; people set off for lunch or a gin and leave them here and there and then there is a storm or night falls and damp comes.
Anita Brookner is deeply gloomy but not dull if the world she portrays interests you; and the quality of the writing is at a high level.
Dull is Archer - who left that? I want to know. Then I can be sure they don't come back.
Sometimes I look at an innocent child with intense suspicion, I know that the most awful people were children once, conversely how do I know that the innocent looking child in front of me will not turn into a most awful person in due course? The same thing with books: some books turn out to be absolutely vile once you come to know them. Shall we start a virtual bonfire of vile books, just a classification on a shelf, no actual burning of course, but I would like to place the mistery Archer there, the book I mean not the crook. I once met him at King's Cross station, in all his pomposity and presumption; he too must have been a child once, awful no doubt.
a bonfire shelf of shameful books is a great idea...
I was reading Agatha Christie's wonderful "The Body in the Library"
(not re-reading, I only saw the TV film, and anyway you can't re-read something you may have read but if so you have forgotten). The following remarks put a new, interesting complexion on gardens:
'He's just - sometimes - a little silly about pretty girls who come to tennis. You know - rather fatuous and avuncular. There is no harm in it. And why shouln't he? After all," finished Mrs Bantry rather obscurely, 'I've got the garden'.
Miss Marple smiled.
Pispolo and Lenna, I'm ruling against. No book burning, not even virtual. There would be nothing left of a Trash Library.
Book flaming, though, is fine; as is book fisking.
Pispolo, you are right,it does raise a query as to the nature of Mrs Bantry's relations with her garden; and what did Miss Marple understand (and I do not) that made her smile?
Miss Marple?
"'You must not worry, Dolly,' she said."
Does that mean that if I - the husband - do the garden, I lose the right to be fatuous and avuncular? Not fair.
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