Signs of Weirdness

[jducoeur]

It says something about our house that msmemory and I spent four hours yesterday rampaging through the sewing room, boxing up eleven solid storage boxes of books (and throwing out a twelfth), and that room still probably contains twice as many books as the average American family owns. It says more that that is only one of five rooms in this house that are full of books. And it says something about our social milieu that that probably isn't all that unusual among our friends...

Comments

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

::eyes only one wall full of books in one room::

I feel so far behind....

[jducoeur]

Give it time. It's taken us twenty years to get to such a plateau of packrattitude...

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure books are pack-rat matter. When Aldric and I moved here to Cameron Park, we had more books between us than the local library. I, myself, have many boxes of books crated up so that I could give over a bedroom to my daughter ;-) And she moved a gazillion boxes out when she recently moved in with her SO, so it must be genetic.

(Except: her dad in Michigan never has a chair or sofa to sit on because he stacks his magazines there. Years of magazines.)

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Sounds like my father. He had OCD/hoarding syndrome.

Like any habit, book buying or book maintaining only is a problem, when it becomes a problem; impacts one's life negatively, etc. So each household has to decide if they've crossed that line or not.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

So is it really a sewing room, or is it just "the extension to the Library which is called the sewing room because that's more useful than calling it Library Room #4?"

[jducoeur]

Really, it's the spare bedroom. But the rooms all got named when we moved in, and had grand theories about what each one would be. And while we don't actually do much sewing in the sewing room, it *is* where all the fabric lives, so the name lives on.

Saying that a room contains lots of books simply isn't a useful distinguishing feature: *every* room in this house is full of books. The library is distinguished mainly in that it contains almost nothing *but* books and other paper...

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

I understand! We've almost got all the bookcases up in the "front room" and hope to move more books in, all of them, I hope, in the next few weeks. And then it will probably be a few years before they stop smelling vagely damp. Sigh. But with this house, it was either the books or the kids who had to live in the garage....

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

probably contains twice as many books as the average American family owns.

Long ago, before I discovered the Archipelago of Weird, all of my 'friends' were from 'average American families'. I expect that your sewing room still contains close to *ten* times the average family allotment. Your *bathroom* contains roughly as much reading matter as the average household owns, at least in my experience.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

...athough there are forces which would make those who are not native to the AofW not have lots of books; my mother, due to my father's influences (see note to Pat, above) is rabidly Anti-Stuff. She, oddly enough, considers the town library to be Her Library. So in a certain way, she has more books even than Mark & Jane, she just stores them elsewhere.

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Duncan has an aunt who owns, herself, only 3 cookbooks, and perhaps 3 or 4 incidental books. Her kids read compulsively -- NO idea where they got it unless the gene came down from the same side that Glenn got it from. Her husband has repair manuals and such, and that's about all. They have beautiful built-in bookshelves, on which are pictures, nick-nacks, etc.

Duncan says it's "creepy."

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Naw...it's only excessive when you *can't* pack all your books yet, because then your bed/couch/tv stand/whatever would lack structural support, or would be missing entirely...