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Member: LouisNosko

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Tagshistory (737), literature (637), American lit (130), historical fiction (129), ancient history (120), biography (106), American history (106), ART (105), medieval (105), English lit (84) — see all tags

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About meClose to retirement now. I am a costumer, i.e., a purveyor of period costumes for operatic and theatrical productions. I have been working at this for over 30 years. Before that I was in academia, and had serious thoughts of one day becoming a "don". But various things conspired to make me change, and I ended up in a field of activity that would have been unimaginable to me as a college student. But what I did keep from my academic days was an inexhaustible appetite for reading, especially in my abandoned vocation of history, Russian or otherwise.

About my librarySometimes I feel my library is like a bonsai. It grows slowly, methodically. Sometimes it grows in spurts, but at all times it is constantly pruned. As many books as I own, I have probably had nearly as many pass through my possession. In fact going onto this site has awakened memories of many books read and unread, owned and lost, or given away. Many years ago as a graduate student and an aspiring academic, my collecton of books had so many devoted to my field in Russian history. Quite a few books have been discarded because interest had waned; perhaps lack of space required some books to be deemed less than essential to be allowed room in the lifeboat. Also one's taste in literature changes, and some of those books have been let go. But some books are not there and their absence puzzles me. What happened to my books by Nabokov? John Fowles? John Barth? Kurt Vonnegut? E.M. Forster? William Styron? Gunter Grass? I have some Thomas Mann still, but where did "Felix Krull" go? "Doctor Faustus?" What happened to my copy of Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita?" Do I want to possess these again? Probably not. I had already read them. I'm sure that I won't re-read them; so just to own them again would only be for the purpose of training visitors' eyes on my bookshelves to show the breadth of my collection. My shelves are my bonsai. Once clipped, for whatever reason, the old branches are gone, and the existing ones are the shape that I'm growing.

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Real nameLouis Nosko

LocationToronto, Ontario

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Account typepublic, lifetime

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URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/LouisNosko (profile)
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Common KnowledgeSeries (173), Awards (355), Characters (3489), Places (693)

Member sinceAug 14, 2009