Feb 19, 2014

My Movie Book Library: 239 and Counting

One year ago, Raquelle of Out of the Past shared a photo of her movie book library. This inspired a few other film bloggers to share their collections, including me. Sadly, inspiration did not lead to action--until now.

My collection started with a few gifts from my parents and expanded with frightening speed once I started prowling used book stores. Eventually, I had to either slow down or move to a bigger house. As all you book hoarders out there know, moving is murder when you have a large library.

This is the shelf where I keep most of my movie books:


The rest of it is shoved into other bookcases, piled up on tables, etc. Eventually I will find one spot for all of it. It would be amazing to do something like Artman did here.

One of the things that always bothers me about my library is that I haven't read so much of it. As I wrote in my post a couple of weeks ago, I'm going to do something about that this year.

I thought I would be more likely to read the titles I hadn't cracked if I knew what I had, so I started a spreadsheet and cataloged everything. Going through the 239 books I'd collected was amazing. I had no idea I had so many!

At first I thought about taking close-up shots of my shelves and stacks so you all could browse my library, but by the time I finished entering titles, I knew getting a clear shot of everything would be hard to do.

Putting the covers of my library in a gallery on Pinterest was a great solution to that problem. Wherever possible, I have used the same cover art/edition as the book I own. Check it out here.

Going through all those books was much more exciting than I expected. So many memories! A library is full of life. There are a lot of stories about my books, in addition to those told inside them. I'm going to share a few over the next month. I hope you enjoy them.

4 comments:

  1. Wow! I never realized how many books I had accumulated until I moved. It's overwhelming. I donated most of them, kept some favorites, and now just borrow from the library.

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  2. This is only the movie books too! I've got two other shelves as well, which I have trimmed down as much as I'm willing. At least this is the only thing I collect. If we ever move, it'll take three times as long to deal with the library as it will the rest of the house.

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  3. Thank you so much for the link and for sharing your collection! Just browsing through your Pinterest and I'm seriously impressed by your collection.

    I know what you mean about running out of space. I'm starting to collect some books as ebooks instead because I just don't have space to keep getting new physical books. But I feel like having a library of physical books on a topic that you are passionate about is worthwhile!

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  4. Raquel--I'm glad you gave me the idea, because I never would have realized how many I had otherwise. The craziest thing about it was that I never set out to build a collection. I was just acquiring, or accepting, books that struck my fancy one or a few at a time. I have come to embrace ebooks more now that I'm running out of space. I especially don't need to own physical copies of everything I review!

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