New Blog: Unpacking My Library

Last week I started a new blog, titled Unpacking My Library. It's basically a weeding out of books from my ever-growing library by writing briefly about one of them every day. The latest post from the new blog will show up in the left column here. Read more about the Unpacking My Library blog below.


[Unpacking My Library, the book; the first post on my new blog]

About Unpacking My Library:

Although the title of this blog is taken from Walter Benjamin's well-known essay from Illuminations, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting" (PDF link), my goal is personal rather than intellectual.

I have a lot of books (over 1,200 cataloged on LibraryThing) but not enough room for them, so to help me determine what books to keep and what books to give away (or sell) I'm going through my books one by one to try to determine the value each holds for me.

So at the rate of roughly one book per day I'll be highlighting one book from my library with a photograph, a description of where I got it, some words on its value (or lack thereof), and a star rating. Books will be labeled by subject, publication date, author and other keywords, but suffice to say most of the books are on architecture and related subjects.

So hopefully this exercise will help determine if a book is worth keeping or passing on to another reader for their own library. And hopefully whoever happens to read this blog will discover some books of interest in the process.