Of Books and Book Shelves: The Travails of an SF Book Collector

As mentioned here and elsewhere, I recently received a boon from my wife.  She finally allowed me to devote some space to bookshelves.  Our quarters are a bit cramped (more due to layout than lack of space) and Karen (that’s the wife) has been reluctant to display my oh-so economical choice of steel shelving to her and the public’s eye.  I can understand that and have sympathy for it, but my desire to display my books – my need to display my books – trumps aesthetics.  (It’s a legitimate need: I often want to refer to a text, compare stories, check editions, an impossible chore when the books are in boxes, or in closets that are in turn concealed behind other furniture.) My ability to cite has been seriously curtailed for the past several years.  Besides, those books are my friends and they’ve told me on any number of occasions that they do not like the stuffy darkness one finds inside of cardboard boxes.

I’m an inveterate collector, I am.  I can’t walk past a used bookstore. I can’t not stop at a yard sale displaying books.  I regularly visit library sales, spend much of my time at conventions in the dealer’s room, waste time in the Antiquarian and Back Issues sections of Ebay and get dusty and sneezy in antique shops. I love getting in review copies (especially ARCs) and especially love it when a new book arrives via the author themselves. I’m convinced that one day I will come across a sky-high pile of pulp magazines, all for a dime (and all in pristine condition of course) tucked away in some barn, hauled to the curb after a garage sale, waiting to be rescued by someone who cares.

I have lists of titles I need in order to fill in an author’s section of the library, titles that have worn (or, sadly, have experienced other damage while in my care; an unnoticed roof leak in a Florida residence mildewed half the books on one shelf; a magazine purchased in California introduced a bookworm plague; the bookworm battle was a legendary epic of numbers and fecundity countered with intelligence and technology – a true science fictions story if ever there was one) that need replacement; I have lists online (Good Reads; Amazon), and in my head.  I even put together a whole website just to keep track of the volume 1, number 1 pulps I own or still need to collect. (Fun to look at but out of date so far as the collection is concerned.)

I lust after certain titles that exceed my economic grasp and I’m respectfully jealous of others whose collections are better than my own (note to those collectors: if you’re looking for a future home….)

Of course they are all physical books.  You can’t “collect” Ebooks.  You can store Ebooks and you can certainly read them, but you can’t get as intimate with them as you can the physical copies.  You can’t smell Ebooks and it is difficult, if not impossible, to attach a personal history to an Ebook.  Go and pull a book from one of my shelves and I’ll tell you all about its origins – the time, the place, the reason for purchasing it, the edition, the cover artist (and of course the story).  “I downloaded it from Amazon” just does not have the same panache as “I was traveling through Texas and came across this little hole-in-the-wall used bookstore. The proprietors were an elderly husband and wife team who must have set up shop during the waning days of the cowboys…”)

And of course with physical books goes the inevitable storage problem.  For some reason I’ve just never been able to justify purchasing good, expensive bookcases.  I look at the price and then immediately think of how many more books I can purchase with for same amount of money.  Over the years I’ve had custom shelves built (while still living in my parent’s home my father built me a set mounted to the wall:  7 shelves, each 14 feet long.  They were immediately packed and over-flowing and one night, around 3 AM, the top shelf gave way with a resounding crack!.  In a cascade not unlike a modern building pancaking during an earthquake, each shelf shattered under the impact from the one above, collapsing to the floor domino fashion.  The pile of books was so huge I couldn’t get out of the room.)  While away at college I constructed the typical milk crate and board shelves (later cinder block and boards) to hold not my class texts but the few hundred books I considered a must-have.  During move after move (I’ve moved a lot over the years) one of the first priorities was always “where are the books going to go?”;  I’ve had attic storage and finished-basement storage, built-in shelves and, ultimately, the steel storage shelves.

For a number of years I rented a house right by the shore in Florida.  It was originally a vacation home, comprised of a den, an enclosed porch, a kitchen and four 15×12 bedrooms.  Being single at the time I was able to use all of the rooms for whatever I wanted and it didn’t take long to set up THE LIBRARY. I had nine five-shelf units, each 54 inches wide.  They were arranged in three three-unit stacks with a snaking path through the room.  They were almost enough to display everything I had (using both sides of each shelf);  reluctantly the non-SF and military history texts remained in boxes.

But it was heaven for a while.  Think of a book and in less than a minute, if I owned it I could have it in my hands.  At a glance I could tell how prevalent a particular author was, their ages and eras (especially for paperbacks:  original Ace Doubles are shorter than standard paperbacks, which are in turn shorter than the “modern” variety – which is a pain in the butt if you want to shelve a long-standing author’s works all together and also want the shelves to have as minimal headroom as is possible).  If all I wanted to do was reminisce, I could spend hours pulling books, chasing down whatever idea or theory had taken my fancy. (Not to mention the heady experience of simply walking slowly through the room, rubbing my hands together and mumbling “mine, mine, aaaalllll mine!”.)

Then I got married and aesthetics – somehow – came to have a level of importance in my life that it had never risen to before.  And somehow, books displayed on battleship gray steel shelving just didn’t seem to fit with any of the other interior decor.  We had porcelain products that fit in, antique furniture that fit in (even a commode!), various paintings that worked, displays of nick-nacks.  My stuff?  The books and the board games and the miniature armored vehicles, the spaceships and model kits, the framed magazine covers – nope.

Now, almost a decade gone by, I have my shelves back.  It’s only three units this time, so I’ve had to resort to the (nearly unacceptable) practice of stacking (which of course meant that I had to very carefully record which author was in what stack on which shelf and print up a map so I can find what I might be looking for) but it’s better than boxes.

I’ve stolen a bit of time here and there over the past couple of weeks and recently completed the re-staking of the paperback section of the library (I still have trade, hardback, over-sized and magazines to get through).  As already mentioned, I had to create an index of the shelving scheme (not by title, only by author – so far) which gave me the idea to share the list of authors on that list here.

I thought it might be somewhat instructive to see who and what I’ve been collecting over the years;  I’ve kept every single science fiction, fantasy and horror book I’ve ever purchased (even managing to recover a few that I mistakenly traded when I was very young and impulsive) over nearly half a century now.  The collection is equal parts things I wanted to read, things I ought to have read, books that are important milestones in the history of the genre and books that were just plain fun.  Or old and collectible. Or cheap. Or….

So here’s the list.  Maybe you’ll find a name you’ll want to check out, maybe you’ll find a name that’s absent and ought to be here (though do remember that this is only the paperback holdings).  Regardless, you’ve got a glimpse into the mind of a far-gone SF collector…one who is still looking for more books and the shelves to put them on.

AUTHORS IN PAPERBACK COLLECTION (note, names are for both authors and editors and, for multi-authored/edited books, only the first name was recorded)

[two]Ackerman
Akers
D Adams
Ri Adams
Ro Adams
Aldiss
Aldrin
Amis
C Anderson
P Anderson
Anthony
Asimov
Asprin
Avalonne
Baen
Ballard
Bannister
Barbet
Barrett
J. Baxter
S Baxter
Beaumont
Beese
Bennett
Bester
Binder
Bischoff
Blish
Bloch
Boardman
Boorman
Boucher
Boulle
Bounds
Bova
Brackett
Bradbury
Bradley
Brin
Brooks
Brown
Brunner
Budrys
Bulmer
Burgess
Burroughs
Busby
Cabell
Caidin
J Campbell
R Campbell
Card
Carnell
Carr
Carter
Chalker
Chandler
Cherryh
Charbonneau
Chase
Clarke
Clayton
Clement
Cole
Conklin
Corley
Correy
Crichton
Curtis
Dalmas
Darlton
Davidson
DeCamp
DeCondido
Delany
Del Rey
Dick
Dickson
Dikty
Disch
Donaldson
Doyle
Dozois
Drake
Drew
Eddings
Elder
Ellison
Elwood
Evans
Farley
Farmer
Farren
Fast
Faucette
Ferman
Fort
Forward
A Foster
R Foster
Friedel
Fyfe
Galyoue
Gernsback
George
Gerrold
Gibson
Gilden
Gilliland
Glut
Gold
Goldman
Gordon
Goulart
Gottleib
Graham
Green
Greenberg
Greene
Greenfield
Greenleaf
Gunn
Haggard
Haiblum
Haldeman
Hambly
Hamilton
Harrison
Hartwell
Heinlein
Henderson
Herbert
Heydt
Hilton
Hippolito
Hogan
Hoskins
Howard
Hoyle
Hughes
(Editors of) If
Ing
Jannifer
Johnson
Jones
Jordan
Karr
Keith
Kerr
Ketterer
Keyes
King
Kline
Knebel
Knight

[/two]

[two_last]Kondo
Koontz
Kornbluth
Kosinski
Kurland
Kurtz
Kuttner
Lackey
Lafferty
Laumer
Lee
Le Guin
Lem
L’Engle
Leiber
Leinster
Lewis
Lichtenberg
Lovecraft
Lundwall
Lupoff
Lynn
MacApp
MacAvoy
MacBride
MacGregor
Mack
Mackay
Malzberg
Marguiles
Marshak
Martin
Matheson
McCaffrey
McCormac
McDaniel
McDonald
McEnroe
McIntyre
McSherry
Merrill
Merritt
Miller
Mills
Moffitt
Monteleone
Moorcock
Moore
Moskowitz
Niven
Nolan
Norman
Aj Norton
An Norton
Nowlan
Nourse
O’Donnell
Offut
Orwell
Page
Palmer
Pangborn
Panshin
Parkinson
Peters
Piper
(Editors of) Playboy
Poe
Pohotta
Pohl
Pournelle
Pratt
Price
Rand
Raymond
Reynolds
Rice
Robeson
Robinson
Roselle
Roshwald
Roy
Russ
Russell
Saberhagen
Sagan
(Editors of) Saturday Evening Post
Saunders
Sawyer
Scalzi
Schmitz
Scott
B. Shaw
T. Shaw
Sheckley
Sherrell
Shute
Silverberg
Simak
Simmons
C.T. Smith
C Smith
E Smith
G Smith
Snyder
Spinrad
Stanton
Stapledon
Steakley
Strieber
Sturgeon
Sutton
Telep
Temple
Tenn
Tilley
Tiptree
Tolkein
Trimble
Trout
Tucker
Tuning
Turtledove
Vardeman
Vance
Van Vogt
Varley
Verne
Vernon
Vinge
Von Harbou
Vonnegut
Watt-Evans
Weber
Weinbaum
B. Wells
H Wells
West
Wheeler
J White
T White
Whitfield
Wilhelm
Williams
Williamson
Wobig
Wolf
Wollheim
Wolverton
Woodcott
Wright
Wylie
Wyndham
Young
Zelazny

[/two_last]