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Member: revelshade

CollectionsYour library (2,961), Wishlist (15), All collections (2,976)

Reviews2 reviews

Tagsscience fiction (1,405), fantasy (434), collection (248), fiction (240), mass market paperback (192), anthology (124), horror (72), frazetta (67), sword and sorcery (54), time travel (40) — see all tags

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

GroupsCrime, Thriller & Mystery, FantasyFans, Hardboiled / Noir Crime Fiction, Science Fiction Fans, The Green Dragon

About meI did a search and found that (as of 9/03/2007) over a thousand LibraryThing members owned Gene Wolfe's "Shadow of the Torturer" in some form, but not a single one was using "book of gold" as a tag, which seems incredible to me. The phrase is so perfect, and the idea it represents is so simple and must resonate so profoundly for any book person. If you will follow the link above to my reviews you will find that my review of "Shadow" is simply an extensive excerpt which (among other things) explains the idea better than I can. Briefly, the Book of Gold is the book you credit (or blame) for making you a librarian.
You say you're not a librarian? Don't kid yourself. Whether you own 50 books or 50,000 you are the caretaker of a collection of fragile, beautiful, valuable artifacts. You own a library, however small, however private, and that makes you a librarian, charged with keeping those books safe until, inevitably, they pass to someone else (you are mortal; so are your books, but with proper care they can out-live you).
So, about me: I found the Book of Gold when I was eleven, in the book section of a department store, back when department stores had book sections. It was a $1.95 paperback (two and a penny with tax), published by Ballantine Books under their Del Rey imprint, categorized as "SF Adventure". The cover bore a painting by Darrell K. Sweet: an enormous, tri-pedal, multi-eyed alien striding through a watery landscape toward three unearthly, ethereal spires on the horizon.
And here I am.

About my libraryTo paraphrase Lord Summerisle, I am a fanboy, but not, I hope, an unenlightened one. My first love was science fiction and fantasy, and although you would find Proust and Austen, Whitman and Wilde on my shelves (and will find them here when I get around to cataloging them), as a collector my focus is the sf and fantasy paperbacks I found on bookstore shelves when I was a boy. I am not a completist of any sort; I am not interested in first editions or in books of special value or rarity. I choose one edition of a title over another for aesthetic reasons (my taste inevitably influenced by nostalgia), and I choose the titles I collect based on the admittedly vague goal of gathering a library of "essential" genre titles (broadly and eccentrically defined) up to about 1990, and a much narrower selection of more recent favorites.

Homepagehttp://revelshade.blogspot.com

Favorite authorsNone

Account typepublic, lifetime

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URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/revelshade (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/revelshade (library)

Common KnowledgeSeries (622), Awards (237), Characters (5636), Places (1216)

Member sinceJan 7, 2006