Obsoletism

I impressed the girl from New Zealand who is staying with us at the moment—impressed and maybe horrified just a little—when I asked to pop into the room where she’s staying and just grab a book from the reference section.  I guess it’s a little atypical to have a reference section in your bedroom, but where else am I going to put my dictionaries?  I didn’t try explaining that the general reference section does not include craft reference books (what kind of a crazy person would have their Knitting Bible next to their Grammar Bible?), nor does it include pre-modern reference books; I want my Anglo-Saxon dictionary by my Anglo-Saxon texts.  She was doubly impressed (or horrified, still not sure which) when I was able to walk right over to the shelf and grab Charles Lipson’s Cite Right almost without even looking; ah! the power of organizing your books!

I usually avoid telling people how I organize my books until I know them fairly well, once people find out your fiction sections are organized by intended audience, genera, author, and original publication year, “because it’s easier that way”, they tend to think you’re crazy (if they didn’t already decide you were crazy when it slipped out you have a “fiction section” on your shelves.).  I’ve also started getting really cagey about exactly how many books I have: before moving to London I culled it down to “between four and five hundred [495] if you don’t count proofs” and obviously any ebooks are excluded.  Since moving back from London I’ve added about 20 feet of books onto the shelves.  Yes, I measure books in feet when I add them to my shelves because you can never buy just one!  But I need them all, and have actually read most of them.  And of course I use my reference section all the time (including the pre-modern western European languages reference books).

I think my new Kiwi friend was bemused that not only did I own a book all about citations (she didn’t see the one I had checked out from the library as well), but I was actually using it.  Most people I know have switched to the internet as a primary source of knowledge for things like citation examples, in part (I’m sure) because information changes so rapidly things in a book can be made obsolete before they’re even published.  I also actually use my Grammar Bible, various punctuation guides, and even my hard copy Oxford English Dictionary (the all-in-one version with the little magnifying glass for added fun!).  This practice confounds people (along with my habitual use of “fortnightly” in conversation), half the time when I pull out my dictionary they look at me like I belong in a museum; more than half the time, however, I find the definition of a word in my book before their phone finds it on the internet.