ABOUT MY LIBRARY.
I have well over 2000 (fiction or occasionally fiction-connected) titles, and mine is an unbroken collection - by which I mean that I have almost every book I ever acquired after I reached 9 or so - the age of buying my own books rather than having them bought for me.
There are also books that were given to me (and which might or might not have been to my taste), some review copies and a good handful that represents my son's teen reading habits.
The bulk of the collection is composed of children's and YA books acquired through various sources. Most came from normal bookshops, but I also haunt library sales, ABE, eBay, bookfinder.com, garage sales, markets and second hand bookshops.
Since the internet arrived, I've managed to fill lots of gaps in childhood series. Then there are books I bought because I know the authors, and books I bought because I liked the blurb/cover/or it seemed a good idea at the time. There is also a sprinkle of books inherited from my mother and grandmother.
Some titles I can pick up and enjoy any time, others make me wonder what I saw in that particular author at any point…
Why don't you have…?
Lots of possible reasons – see the following examples.
(1) Lord of the Rings, Alice in Wonderland, Black Beauty etc.
I don’t like them, have tried reading but couldn’t finish etc. I've never got through LotR because I much prefer humour in my fantasy. I also prefer (on the whole) mainly human characters. I don’t like AiW because it's fantasy that doesn’t make sense… things happen for no particular reason. I don’t like Black Beauty because I prefer stories where animals and humans interact in more normal fashions and I don’t like being manipulated by fiction – any fiction.
(2) Stranger in a Strange Land (when you have most other Heinlein titles).
Perversely, I often tend not to like the best known or most popular of an author's output. Examples include Diana Wynne Jones' 'Dalemark' books (I much prefer other titles), Catherine Jinks' award-winning "Pagan" books (I much prefer her "Witchbank") etc.
(3) More titles by Mavis Thorp Clarke, Ivan Southall, Hesba Brinsmead, Mary Grant Bruce and other Australian stalwarts?
I don’t have these titles because they belong to the collection my sister and I shared until her 1975 marriage. At that time we split the collection- partly according to inclination (I'm much more interested in fantasy and sf than she is, while she's more interested in non-genre novels and detective fiction) but also according to bulk personal ownership. For example, she, being older than I, had more books by earlier authors. Our parents tended not to duplicate gifts, so she might have had (say) 3 books by a particular author before I was old enough to enjoy them. If she owned 9 books by an author and I had 3 by the same author, she took the whole 12 when we split the collection. With newer writers it tended to go the other way because I might have more titles in a set. Thus I ended up with all the Margaret Mahy titles.
(4) What – no Arthur Ransome?
My sister has the whole set. If I want to read it, I borrow it from her. Other authors whose work she has and I borrow include Dick Francis, Kerry Greenwood, Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Simon Brett, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Jo Bannister, Ellis Peters, and Dorothy Sayers.
(5) Why all those Heyers/Heinleins/Treases/DWJ/Monica Edwards/L.M. Montgomerys/Piers Anthonys/Barbara Michaels???
That depends. I collected the Heyers (mostly second hand) in my teens, ditto most of the Heinleins. Many of the LMMs belonged to my mother. Geoffrey Trease, Monica Edwards and Diana Wynne Jones are three of my favourite 'foreign' (i.e. non-Australian) authors. I've been collecting them since childhood in the case of Edwards and Trease and since my teens in the case of DWJ. I enjoy Barbara Michaels' books and have picked up most of those from library sales etc as and when I see them. I do enjoy a lot of Piers Anthony's books, but most of the Xanth titles were actually my son's, as are all the Robert Asprin titles.
Why don't you have … (insert title of famous/award-winning/provocative/controversial/acclaimed/
important book…)?
Because I haven’t seen it, don’t like the look of it or am simply being perverse.
Why do you have only one book by this author? Didn't you enjoy it?
One or two or no books by an author doesn't necessarily mean I don't enjoy his/her writing. It may reflect an author with a very limited output – Catherine Bell, Sally Rogers-Davidson, Valerie Weldrick, Beatrice Brandon, Victoria Walker and Elizabeth Marie Pope seem to have written only one or two books each (at least under those names). It may reflect a duplicate of a book my sister has – I borrow the rest from her if I want to read them. It may reflect the fact that the library has a good stock of an author's work, or that I haven't seen any / more books by that author for sale. Or it may reflect a book I was given or picked up at a sale or had as a review copy or acquired in some other non-purposeful fashion and found not sufficiently to my taste to persuade me to chase more by that author.
Occasionally, I find that a diligent author wrote lots of books but that I found just one or two to my taste. Sometimes this reflects a childhood favourite, other times I actually bought several others before giving up looking for 'another one like that'. A few of these authors and my favoured title are listed below.
Ronald Syme – Nosecap Astray.
Arthur C. Clark – Dolphin Island.
Margaret J. Baker – The Cats of Honeytown.
David Severn – Drumbeats and The Future Took Us.
Barbara Freedman – A Haunting Air.
Kenneth Lillington – The Secret Arrow.
