My wife and I are moving out of the apartment we’ve rented for the last five years and into another apartment in the same neighborhood. The onerous task of culling through our books has fallen to me – perhaps justly, since I’m the one who collected most of the damned things in the first place. My goal is to discard at least two boxes. I’ve been struck, though, by the number of books on my shelves that I found among other people’s discards.
Indeed, hardly a day goes by in Brooklyn that I don’t see a box of cast-off books sitting on a stoop or by a curb, with a “Free – Take Me” sign, or (once) a glow-stick casting its alien light over the offerings. The entire borough, viewed from a certain angle, is like a great rotating library: you take my copy of Mules and Men, I’ll relieve you of your Sense and Sensibility.
What follows, in no particular order, is a catalogue of the 30 books I’ve apparently taken from other people’s stoops over the last five years: a sort of portrait of a certain time and place. I’d be curious to hear about your own finds in the comments box below.
- Baker, Nicholson: Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization
- Ackerman, Diane: A Natural History of the Senses
- Maugham, W. Somerset: The Razor’s Edge
- Elizabethan Plays (a 1933 anthology; no author)
- Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time (trans. Macquarrie & Robinson)
- Baldassare Castiglione: The Book of the Courtier
- Garcia Lorca, Frederico: Three Plays
- Bréton, André, ed.: What is Surrealism?
- Tsvetaeva, Marina: Selected Poems
- Mitchell, David: Ghostwritten
- Harvey, David: Spaces of Hope
- Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm: Fairy Tales
- Pinter, Harold: The Proust Screenplay
- Marlowe, Christopher: Plays and Poems
- Woolf, Virginia: Essays, vol. II
- Faludi, Susan: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
- Merot, Pierre: Mammals
- Pope, Alexander: The Rape of the Lock
- Reed, Lou: Rock & Roll Heart (okay, it’s a VHS tape, but still pretty cool)
- Marcuse, Herbert: One-Dimensional Man
- Calvino, Italo: Italian Folktales
- Thompson, Willie: Postmodernism and History
- Cocteau, Jean: Five Plays
- Amis, Martin: Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
- Gibbon, Edward: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. IV
- Bissell, Tom: God Lives in St. Petersburg
- Calasso, Roberto: Ka
- Portis, Charles: Norwood
- Didion, Joan: Miami
- St. Augustine: The City of God
[Image credit: steelight]
