A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
Saturday, April 29, 2017
A REPLYTO AN OLD QUESTION
Someone, I cannot now find the question, asked me on this blog how many books I have in my personal library. The answer is very few, perhaps 1500-1600, or so, down-sized from when I lived in Massachusetts. That is a very small library for a professor my age. On the other hand, I have read almost all of them. I have them organized in five groups, each separately alphabetized: General, Economics, Marx, Kant, and Afro-American Studies. There is also a small Mathematics section, and of course all the music I acquired during my viola study and quartet playing. Oh, and also a section devoted to various editions of the books I have published or in which I have published. That is reasonably large.
This sums of the state of american literacy (reading the comments is depressing):
ReplyDeletehttps://www.uhaul.com/MovingSupplies/Boxes/Standard-Sized-Moving-Boxes/Book-Box?id=3161
By comparison you have the library of Alexandria!
Do you have a separate area for novels and fiction? You've often commented how you read Jane Austen and also spy novels/thrillers.
But where are the cookbooks? (I recently downsized and gave away 500+ cook/food books, leaving about as many. It was instructive). On the other hand, I have a first-edition of R. Smullyan's Theory of Formal Systems in its brilliant princeton orange.
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