Yes.

No, I was taking a break from work and I am proud of my library so I took the opportunity to share.


It just seemed...right. The books aren't really literature so they need to go somewhere else (other than IN the bookcase, not that there's any room in there), and some of them didn't fit in the narrow bookcase with the poetry so I moved them to the top of the bookcase with literature and have them with the contemporary fiction.

Oh that's not true at all. You see, my Russian biographies are the following people: Bakunin, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Pasternak and Nadezhda Mandelshtam's memoirs about her husband, the poet Osip Mandelshtam. Pasternak and Mandelshtam shift from the poetry well and Bulgakov ties in with the contemporary non-poetic works. They're literary biographies. The non-literary biographies are in my Russian history bookcase (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Peter the Great, Rasputin, Nicholas II et al.).

I think it's quite apparent. They're all fanciful books and all very well written.

Try archaeological reproductions.

Several, and I keep buying from them from time to time. I have an Egyptian statue, a bust of Dionysus, a wall hanging of the Three Graces, etc.

The philosophy books in my bedroom are books on Russian thought, including Russian Orthodox spiritual thought. I have Berdyaev, Ivanov, a book on the Russian Avant-Garde, Soloukhin, and others down there. The philosophy books in the library are the traditional Western philosophers and political theorists - Nietzsche (lots of him), Kant, Spinoza, Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Bakunin, and more contemporary people like Edward Said, Christopher Hitchens and Noam Chomsky. Classical philosophy is, of course, with the other books in Greek and Latin. See, there's a lot more I could have written but didn't.

It's both, with the former providing the bridge to the latter. The first book is Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia in Latin, followed by Brill Publishing's Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (the hardcover one volume version) and then Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century by Richard Kieckhefer (in Latin with English commentary). From there it goes to the Lemegeton and Ars Notoria and then I feel like I can just put any crap after that, like Blavatsky's unabridged Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine in hardcover, Carlos Castaneda books, Nostradamus's prophecies, Crowley's Magick and back to my Missale Romanum, which presents the Latin mass for the entire year in a book big enough for (and probably intended for) an altar. See, it came right back around to Latin...


Bookcase five is exclusively Modern Western languages. Much of my bookcase on Ancient Egypt has to do with its language at all stages of development, from my complete Pyramid Texts in three huge hardcover volumes (with German commentary) to the complete Nag Hammadi codices in Coptic, and grammars and dictionaries covering each phase separately. I have books dealing exclusively with Egyptian poetry, the Book of the Dead, and a whole host of other topics.

Modern Eastern languages are mixed into my non-Western history bookshelf (books such as Bahasa Indonesia, A Higher Sanskrit Grammar, Nahuatl as Written, Translating Buddhism from Tibetan and the Chinese dictionaries and grammars that are in the best condition are there - a lot of Chinese stuff is in the basement, though) or, in the case of Arabic, Cantonese and Hawaiian, on the bottom shelf of the dictionary stand.

The ancient Near East Languages (including Old Persian and Gatha Avestan) are grouped topically with books about the ancient Near East, which is directly below books on Islam, Sufism and classical Arabic (note the distinction between that and modern standard Arabic, which is on the dictionary stand), which is on the same shelf as the beginning of Judaica. Judaica, of course, blends into the history of religion on the shelf next to it (the Egypt one).


By topic, of course. Who gives a damn about when a book was published, as long as it's still relevant?