Wonderful thread here on what book collections can be—
Things a book collection does not have to be:
- rare books
- expensive books
- enormous
- old
- literary
- only books at all
Things a book collection can be:
- acquired through trade
- focused on art
- focused on reader annotations
- hyperlocal
- modest
- niche
- political
- practical
This got me thinking a bit about my own book collection(s)…I own hundreds of books, but haven’t really thought a lot specifically about developing any subset as a particular collection. If I did, a couple that come to mind would be:
- constrained poetry / poetics: both books of interesting experimental writing / poetry and books about such things as Oulipian experiments, poetic forms, etc.
- education and pedagogy: collecting a broad historical cross-section of different influential texts on learning, teaching, interesting schools and other educational projects…I have a few and it’d be fun to get more in the weeds and seek out other rare / fascinating stuff here!
-
books about translation: one of my favorite topics & lots of potential for coming at this from different angles (art; craft; language; meaning) and getting meta
Do you have any particular collections, or ones you’d like to develop?
Old computing books? Books-as-object? Imaginary books? Books with wonderful indexes? Tabletop RPG books?