#Microblog Monday 371: Combining Bookshelves
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It took us 20 seconds of conversation to choose whether to combine finances but it has been over 20 years, and we still haven’t fully integrated our bookshelves. We also haven’t completely de-duped our shelves. When the twins were little, they liked to play match-up with our duplicates. They would touch one spine on one bookcase and then touch the identical spine on another bookcase. Two copies of Dubliners by James Joyce. Two copies of every A. B. Yehoshua.
A few years ago, we attempted to de-dupe, but I dragged a bunch of copies out of the donate pile. (It’s good to have two Anne Enrights! What if we both need to read it at the same time?) We also attempted to integrate without much success. Four bookcases are fully mine. Two bookcases are mostly Josh. Three bookcases are a mix, though the books run in clumps — three of mine followed by fours of Josh’s followed by a few more of mine. Our books hang out together, but they’re just friends.
The stacks of books behave in similar ways, almost like they learned how to behave from the books on the shelves.
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3 comments
This made me smile. Our bookcases are definitely separate! Years of me being in a bookclub (when we only had one copy of a book and shared it around) and the last decade of e-books means he has many more books (and bookcases) than I do. One day we will need to downsize!
Except for our kindle shared account, and I was too far in before I realised that vwas not a good idea! Though we maintain separate “shelves” in the account so I don’t have to wade through his books. Oh, and I use his library card for my e-library books too!
Dh didn’t have a lot of books when we were first married. I think we did have a couple of duplicates but we got rid of them. He mostly uses an e-reader these days, but he does have a shelf in one of our bookcases for his favourite books. 🙂 I had to laugh when I read Mali’s comment above, because we started out sharing a Kobo account… that didn’t last very long! lol
We don’t have separate shelves, but I can look at any book in the house and tell you if it’s mine or not. We did do a large purge a few years ago where we got rid of duplicate titles in an even-handed way.
I almost never buy books anymore, having shifted almost entirely to borrowing from the library. Q. still buys a lot but for work and those have dedicated shelves in the study.