Is there no end to book-related ponceyness?
Today's Guardian Weekend contains a whole section on 'Spring Makeover' (premature need for one's Royal Wedding Sickbags?).
[A] flat with lots of tricks up its sleeve. Check out the sparsity of books and the general ponceyness of the arrangements on the shelves.
But, worse yet, Author Stuart Walton* on a life-changing decision to get rid of his books. Taking a stiff drink to unthick my chilled blood on reading this:
I run a brutally efficient new system: buy, read, flog on Amazon Marketplace. It's a midlife rite of passage.
So, here is someone who presumably never rereads anything and never needs books (beyond a shelf and a half's worth) for research? Speaking as someone who has vast quantities of books which are either primary research materials or secondary scholarly studies, eeeeeuuuwwwwwww. Not to mention that I have a taste for a number of writers whose books are not yet digitally available, falling as they do between out of copyright and currently being published.
And for your remaining slim handful of choice tomes, voila le shelving mega-poncey (no 5 in the gallery is particularly head-bangy, only surpassed by no 6 'The feel of books without losing all that house room. Vintage bookshelf wallpaper').
Oliver Burkeman, however, asks a pertinent question: Does clutter indicate a spiritual burden - or a full life?:
[T]here's nothing morally superior about the severe lines or vast white spaces of ultra-minimalist apartments. Compulsive hoarding is a favoured topic of reality shows and human-interest magazines, but it's easy to imagine the opposite psychological disorder: the compulsive expunging of stuff.
*Nevererdovim. A quick check online and, if it's the same one, he writes lots of books on booze and cocktails. Now we know what he needs the space for....
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1412263.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.