Member libraryganesh

Books: 2,104
Collections: Your library (2,104)
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Joined: Feb 16, 2016

About My Library

Although I've collected books most of my life, my collection has its seeds in visits to my grandparent's house where they had a book-lined hall leading to a library complete with fireplace, oil paintings, and green shag wall to wall carpet. In college, my grandparents downsized and offered me my pick of any of their books, the 100 or so I took forming the beginnings of my library, and eventually I ended up with some of the bookshelves and most of the furniture, and one of the paintings.

In the ensuing 20 years, the collection has grown considerably, first crammed in the stray corners of a crumbling 1860's rowhouse which a friend described as 'literally books everywhere' in a good way, and now throughout most of the rooms of a house outside of Baltimore. On occasion, I've acquired small collections on subjects that interest me, although usually books enter my library one at a time or in small groups. Everything is organized, generally by subject, although largely in a way that only makes sense to me. Read books on the ground level, to be read upstairs.

The actual library itself has wall to wall shelves, a large oriental rug, creaky chairs, and an antique dining room table that hosts the occasional dinner party prone to people fact checking and conducting dramatic readings of erotica between courses. The major areas of collection include art history, gardening history, regular old history, and cultural heritage issues. Smaller collections include 18th century French history and culture, World War II, and my grandmother's (rather dated) collection of anthropology/material culture from the 60's to 90's. There is a pretty eclectic mix of everything else as well. I mostly read (and purchase) non-fiction, but tend to follow my intellectual whims more than any grand plan.

This is a working library and books are regularly read, used and lent, although a few quite rare things are sprinkled in.

Mind the provenance marks...

About Me

Friends once described my aesthetic as 'a Librarian up to No Good' and they weren't wrong. As a child I saw the work of Edward Gorey and decided being a shadowy fur-draped figure watching a game of croquet while leaning on an urn on a terrace was far more fun than whatever my parent's had planned for me. Thus far, it is working rather nicely.

I am actually a librarian, although not the sort who works in a library. My undergraduate focused on 18th century French and Italian painting and my MLIS focused on Cultural Heritage Information Management. In addition, I've done post-graduate work on Antiquities Trafficking and Art Crime. I do research for fun. My passion is understanding culture in all its forms, but particularly where things get messy, complicated or run into legal issues. I'm perpetually sniffing around some sort of academic project involving book crime. When I'm not reading, I'm generally haunting the lesser visited corners of museums, drinking tea, cooking complicated meals, listening to moody Russian symphonies and Baroque masses or growing ferns and poisonous plants in the swampy woods I call home. I'm either terribly boring or dreadfully interesting. Quite possibly both.

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