This week, the Boston Bibliophile has managed to come up with another great question for the Tuesday Thingers group:Work multiples. Do you own multiple copies of any books? Which ones? Why? Can you share your list?
Well, in answer to the first question – yes, I have multiple copies of many books. I will not bore everyone with the full list. Quite a few of them are in storage (almost my entire Huckleberry Finn collection, for instance), and I haven’t been able to list them in my LibraryThing catalogue yet.
Also, the list that I come up with when I look at the “Work Multiples” category under “Statistics” doesn’t really reflect my actual LT catalogue. For instance, it shows that I have eleven copies of various editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. But when I do a search for those titles in my Library, I come up with fifteen different editions. And I notice several other instances where the Statistics page doesn’t really mesh with my actual collection.
Weird.
We have multiple copies of the works of Shakespeare (you would expect that of English majors, I guess) and the Bible. And Dante. And several American authors because we had individual editions of their works and then acquired the Library of America collections and just haven’t managed to rid ourselves of the earlier copies yet.
I really do try not to keep multiple copies of a book unless it’s one I really love. So I was a bit surprised to see how many duplicate titles I actually have (24). Some of them (the Barbara Pyms, the Anthony Powells, the Muriel Sparks) I can understand. But how the heck did we end up with two copies of The Madwoman in the Attic by Gilbert and Gubar, or Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, especially that copy in German?
And surely nobody really needs two copies of Three Tragedies by Federico Garcia Lorca. Or even one copy, come to think of it. I mean life is depressing enough on its own, right? (Sorry – but that’s what waiting in line three hours to vote can do.)
So funny! I agrre. I don't generally reread depressing books. Amazing how books can find their way into your home without you realizing it.
ReplyDeleteYour library must be huge.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I have multiple copies of the Bible, they're of different versions. That is the only book I have multiples of except for ARCs that publishers mistakenly send me after they've sent the first copy.
ReplyDeleteI've cleared all the physical duplicates off my bookshelves, and don't have any interesting multiples ...
ReplyDeleteI completely forgot about the Bibles since I haven't cataloged those in LT. Most of the duplicates in my library were on purpose--and mostly thanks to my husband. :-) Some of his influence has rubbed off on me though. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.
ReplyDelete