Personal Libraries
Darwin Catholic has a post about his growing family library. Over the past 5 years the number of books in my “library” has been growing a steady but constant rate. But there are definite patterns in terms of how my collection has been piling up. I tend to keep technical books, but trade in non-technical books after one or two readings. Initially this meant I had a lot of programming related books (still have ‘em), but over the past few years I’ve been depending on online supplements like Safari Library. Now my technical books tend to be more oriented toward science, the collected papers of Motoo Kimura or W.D. Hamilton, or D.S. Falconer’s Introduction of Quantitative Genetics. My non-technical books I often take to the used book store and try to trade them in for more technical books. For example, recently I exchanged Future of Freedom & Lust in Translation for Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach. The result is over time my small library has a larger and larger proportion of books on genetics & mathematics and a constantly changing cast of works of history, sociology, psychology, etc. The rule of thumb that works for me is that I tend to retain books with a high load of contingent theoretical information, and am casual about trading in those works which are dense on loosely related fact. Across the sample space of facts I have rather good recall and I don’t usually refer back to the original works from which I derived those facts because it is usually quicker to go to the internet and look up an isolated datum for confirmation then to rummage through the index of a book where it might be found. In contrast, theoretical constructs are harder to retrieve on the web in a fully fleshed out form without a lot of effort,1 and quite often without regular usage I forget how to implement the detail of technical methods. I still remember the general outline of my course on the Peasants’ War of 1525 as well as my linear algebra classes, but in the former case individual errors in recall don’t result in the collapse of the whole structure of knowledge. In the latter case I’ve had to revisit linear algebra texts for details because small errors compound so as to make my recall close in worthless in many cases in implementation.
1 – A lot of the introductions to models on Wikipedia & elsewhere seem a bit simple. Then, when you go to papers there is the implicit assumption of a lot of background detail. So it seems to me that there is a space on the web for mid-level formalism and theory which is often missing, and can be most easily found in textbooks which you wouldn’t normally find in your local public library.
Labels: Personal
I’m a hoarder. I spent $1000 shipping my library from PDX to MN — about a ton of books. I keep every book I have ever read with any interest. Many of books are parts of large projects, and I’ve been selling off some of the projects I know I’ll never get to on ABE.
Pricing books is an art. Any book that’s ever been extensively used as an undergrad text (or as a reading for a religious group) will be cheap. Any best-seller will be cheap. Very specialized small-readership books that don’t go out of date are the best to sell — they keep their value or add value, because they’re rarely reprinted.
There’s also a market for collectibles (first editions in pristine condition) that I’m not part of.
I’m getting to the age where I’m starting to accumulate enough knowledge such that it becomes very difficult to track down the information using merely “key words” in my brain. So I’m starting to make a list of key words on my personal forum (and on my Gmail account) – and through that I link up important terms to original sources that I’ve encountered. It’s a sort of cognitive tool.
I liked your sentence “individual errors in recall don’t result in the collapse of the whole structure of knowledge.” It seems that conceptual subjects are the sort of subjects where individual errors in recall do result in the collapse of the whole structure of knowledge.
On a side note – I’m finding e-books increasingly useful for my needs. I even download books that I already have off BitTorrent – since it’s a lot easier to keep those books where-ever I go.
E-books can be word-searched, too.
Steven Pinker has an intriguing, cubist way (youtube) of organizing books.
I got a nice comment from “Diana” and checked out your site. I have two copies of From Dawn to Decadence on my bedtable—and Jacques will live forever in my brain….
I took the liberty of linking your site, as I have about 3000 books and have begun to lose track……
I am an ex-FSO Arabist who has gone pro-Israeli since 9/11. My Arab friends are perplexed, but that’s not my problem. My extended kinship group is Irish/German/Dutch male which makes me a persecuted minority in the blogosphere. Although occasionally I drop a billet doux on M. Yglesias and Kevin Drum!
Gaza has been a prison since the Philistines[aka Pelasgian raiders during the Hyksos era] settled on that sandy strand.