I cannot believe I am hunting the internet for Andy Rooney’s segment on 60 Minutes tonight – or that I tuned into 60 Minutes for that matter. I enjoyed it but I also get the feeling I should take my teeth out and put them in a glass to soak now. I remember my grandparents watching that show, back when there wasn’t such a thing as network news channels.
a- ha! I found it! – it’s the third down on the right, in the current menu display, titled Books or Video in the Future?
Rooney’s segment, which I will link to if I can find it, was all about his 1000th commentary, and how the network has them all on tape. He then wondered if tape would ever really, truly replace books, and went on to talk about a few of his favorite books, the ones he would never part with, because they are his most-useful references. There was a leather-bound four-volume set of Darwin, a few guides to writing, and a book by Walter Lippman titled A Return to Morals.
Rooney’s favorite books are mostly of the reference variety, and it got me thinking: what books do I hold on to, either because I refer to them frequently, or because they have sentimental meaning to me?
Hubby answered the question by saying, if the waters were rising in the basement again and all our books were down there, he’d grab his copies of the Baseball Prospectus dating back from 1991 to the present. They’re more of a historical reference for him, based on his years as a rotisserie baseball player, because he can look back at the names of the players in the National League and remember what was going on in his life when those players were on active rosters.
For me, if all the books I own were in the basement and another nor’easter rolled in (the last one got all my second-tier cookbooks, the ones I don’t refer to constantly but liked having around – damn storm) to flood the basement, well, I’d hope that I’d learn not to keep my books down there anymore. But since I’m not too swift on the uptake, I’d have to grab my copy of the complete unabridged works of Shakespeare, which I had to buy in college and weighs about six thousand pounds AND I had to carry it to class every day (up a hill, both ways, in the snow in South Carolina). But the notes in the margins are worth the book itself, and gosh do I love that book. Reading it helped me write one of my favorite, and (if you ask me) best papers for that class, which touched on herbal abortions, madness and sex.
After I chuck the sixteen pound Shakespeare up the stairs, I’d grab my wedding album, with the proof book if possible, and the baby name book I found in my parent’s house, which I think they used to name me. We also found Freebird’s names in there, one of the few books that has both.
Fiction? Sadly, I don’t have any must-keep editions of fiction, though I get a giddy thrill from the books I have that were thoughtfully signed by the authors. The books I have to grab possess that reference to my past with such sentimental meaning that they can’t be replaced by Alibris or Half.com.
And funny enough, as Rooney says in his segment, I wouldn’t grab a single videotape as a irreplaceable reference.
If my [hypothetical] basement were flooding, I’d grab my collection of Carla Kelly and Ellen Emerson White books. And maybe my set of Fruits Basket, but those are actually still in print and not a bitch to find. And then I’d find a tarp and see what I could do about saving everything else, because hell no I’m not giving up any of my books without a fight.
I might not race to grab any videos, but you can bet that my computer would be pretty high up on that list, so Andy Rooney’s primary argument, which seemed to be “things were better when I was a kid and we didn’t have all this new-fangled stuff,” falls apart there. But that might be me nitpicking because I don’t like Andy Rooney. (The guy thinks dictionaries can’t be replaced by new media? Has he heard of dictionary.com?)
I have to admit that all—all—of my favorite romances, murder mysteries, and interesting antique novels (Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, anyone?) reside in the basement. Am I asking for a flood, or what?
But if catastrophe struck, they could all be replaced. Even the hilarious and obscure Gothic novel send-up, Sweet Jael, by Sarah Farrant. Love that book. What a hoot it was to read about an evil governess who literally kills her way into marriage with the unsuspecting hero!
I would grab video’s of my daughters birth and family photo albums. Not reference, just personal stuff that I might be inclined to enter a burning/flooded building, to save. Ok, ok, my ibook is coming too…
All of my books are replaceable, though, it would be expensive to do so and to track down authors to resign the newer copies….but it could be done.
That being said…in The Day After Tomorrow, when they started to burn the books in the NY Public Lib. I squirmed in my seat..yeah, yeah, keeping warm to live..those were books damnit!
Oh lord that would be a scramble.
My hardcover personal printed edition #54 of 100 of Out of the River Mist By C. Raymond Clar
The most money I ever spent on a non-fiction book and it’s about the early settlers in Guerneville CA,
My hardcover first edition of William Gibson’s Neuromancer
Nuff said.
My hard to find prize hardcover of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Catch Trap
The first butch (non-effeminate) Gay romance I read at age 16 and love to this day. Published 1979
That reminds me I need to review The Catch Trap! Thanks for the reminder.
Under no circumstances would I keep my books in my non-existent basement. But in case of flood, there are three books I’d never leave my house without.
Strunk, Elements of Style
Chicago Style Manual
My big ass Roget’s
Yes, all three are easily replaceable, but the 30+ years of accumulated knowledge thats in the margins and on various sticky notes aren’t. Someone swiped my last Strunk and I cried. I keep my ‘new’ one well-hidden from sticky fingers. I lost my entire keeper shelf in a move several years ago. In any future moves I will hand carry my books myself.
If I had advance warning of the flood, I’d bring these also:
My ‘disease’ library. (Don’t ask.)
All my SEPs. Those books are like a primer on writing romantic comedy.
All my Octavia Butlers, but especially the Parable stories.
It’s not videotape, but first of all I’d grab the iMac and heave it out the door—all the family multimedia from the last four years is on it.
For someone who loves to read, I don’t keep a lot of books and I don’t usually get attached to them as objects in and of themselves. Once I might have raced for my OOP copy of The Element of Fire… but Martha Wells recently reprinted it so even that wouldn’t be as hard to replace now.
p.s. herbal abortions, madness and sex? Let me guess: Ophelia. (And BTW, if you ever find a copy of that essay I would love to read it.)
All my cookbooks and the back ups disks for my photo’s
I do own All of Dara Joy’s Matrix of Destiny series.(See? I owned up to it like a big girl) And although I haven’t cracked them in many many moons i’d saved them.
And my copy of “On Writing” by Stephen King.
I would mostly save my cookbooks (at least a good portion of them), because baking and cooking is what I do for a living, and all of my baking books are “sticky noted” all over the place; plus, I have this outlandish dream of opening a tea house someday, and I’ll need those books then!
As for the rest of my books, I have a few autographed editions of stuff that I would try to save, but everything else is replacable.
Everything hardcover because (a) those suckers are expensive and (b) I had to love it desperately to pay hardcover price for it in the first place. I have a bunch of ancient (older than I am)Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazines that would be next. There’s an out-of-print book by Joyce Myrus that was a high point of my teenage romance-reading experience and has already been rescued from mom’s garage sale pile and a mold problem. A book of fairy tales that mommy read to me from when I was wittle. My original Anthony Mallory (stolen from mum), the cover of which is pre-Fabio era and pre-flowery abstract reprint era and made my little teenage heart palpitate.
My laptop contains my list of what’s on the shelves, which is enough reason to save it, not that it would ever be in the basement! And my entire TBR pile, because those haven’t been added to the list yet and I have no idea what’s there…
Journals? Not that I’ve chronicled anything particularly fascinating, but they’re awful purty.
I’d be diving for my Octavia Butler Collection (although the possibility of a flood is pretty slim until the sealevels rise sufficiently). Sure, I could replace the books, but the signatures are priceless to me now that Ms. Butler has died. Sad, sad day that was.
I think books take priority over videos because (a) more videos are replaceable, but also (b) you can put annotations in books but cannot in videos. My seasons of BTVS are fungible. My hand-marked-up copy of Silverlock is not.
My “the house is on fire—grab what you can, quick!” list:
1. The cat.
2. The flash drive that I back up all my writing to.
3. That marked-up copy of Silverlock.
4. The marked-up copy of The Three Musketeers.
5. A big-ass Norton Anthology of Literature from college (why yes, also marked up).
6. And if I really had time, I might grab my original, first-printing of Podkayne of Mars.
The sad thing is, a few months ago, we had a fire scare in our building, and the only thing I grabbed was the cat. I didn’t even take the flash drive! Bad writer! No biscuit!
Most of my books are replaceable, but I have a copy of Little Women that was printed in the 1930s and belonged to my grandmother when she was growing up. I’d do my best to grab it after rounding up the cat and my family photos.
Hmmm, it seems strange that I only have one I couldn’t replace. I’m sure I’m forgetting something.
Basement, what basement? We have a crawl space. When you live at sea level, not many houses have basements.
However, if there were time to save things from flooding, I guess the cat, family photographs and the photograph albums, and the computer files would be our first priorities. I love my books, my vinyl and CD recordings, my video tapes and DVDs, but I wouldn’t regret their loss as much as those other items.
Kay
Probably the only IRREPLACEABLE fiction book I have is the Complete Works of Flannery O’Conor which my husband got me for an anniversary and which is marked, dog-eared, and has a lovely inscription from hubby in it. I love my other books but they are replaceable. And if it came down to a choice between the wedding albun and that book…I’d save the album. And of course the dog.
I would also have to salvage the biochemistry book that cost $1000, 3 pints of blood, and my first born child. And the environmental chemistry book with similar origins (both of which could not be sold back for more than $10 and have proved to be valuable references.)
Ok, if we’re talking what to save if my house is on fire, then the family photos and all discs of the family photos go first. After that, there are only a couple books I own that are, to me, irreplaceable (sp? I wrote that 4 times and it still looks wrong).
1. My copy of Bulworth’s Collected Works (“It was a dark and stormy night…” anyone?) that my mother gave me for my birthday last year.
2. The copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses that my mom bought me when I was born.
And that’s pretty much it. I think everything else is replaceable, but the sentiments behind those two books are not.
And the MacBook’s a given. *grin*
Why you should save the books and not the video, from a librarian: because with video, multi-media, etc., you’re already fighting a battle with the progress of technology and format. The format you have it in will not always have readily available hardware to play it on. You’re going to lose data as you keep transferring the information into new formats (thingk the loss of quality from Super8 home movies to VHS to DVD). Books last a lot longer (although we do have acidic paper issues and fire, mold, wetness issues) and are easier to copy. I’m pretty sanguine about all this because once you’ve tossed 1000+ volumes into a dumpster, you realize the book’s just a thing for transferring information/knowledge to the person.
It would have to be a fire for me – my room’s on the top floor…but still, I would grab:
1. The battered copy of The Collected Works of the Brothers Grimm I was given when I was born.
2. My laptop (all my stories! No flashdrive for me…)
3. My autographed first edition of Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love, as well as the ARC of her collection Saffron and Brimstone
4. My autographed edition of George R R Martin’s A Feast for Crows
5. And my first acceptance letter ever, which I have STILL not framed and resides in the broken drawer of my desk.
That’s why I prefer to have 3rd-floor flats! 😉
Anyway, which books to save? I’m sure I would have a big bag handy so I could take all the notebooks and folders with all the stories and poems I wrote from age 7-25.
My 19th-century travel guides (because these are the most expensive as well as the rarest books I own).
Rosemary Sutcliff’s Blood Feud.
Anne Rice’s The Tale of the Body Thief.
My Holland House books.
My 1895-edition of Tennyson’s works (first antique book I’ve ever bought).
And—
Okay, I’d probably drown …
The loss of even one book would make me cry, but there are more important things. I have a DVD of all the movies my parents took when I was a child, and a recording of my grandfather talking about his childhood and his time in WWII. I also have my grandfathers war bible with the metal cover and a book of fables that my grandmother gave me when I was three. Those will all have to go in the pillowcase with the cat.
Ooooh, tough. I don’t know. I think about this kind of stuff, especially reading about the Katrina victims and their few things that they saved from their houses. If I had to fill my Saturn and run, I would throw my laptop in (though all my files are pretty much backed up online), my box of childhood photos, my high school yearbooks (at least my senior year), my two signed copies of Dave Barry books. From there, I would put things in that cost me the most, till the car was full, along with of course medicines, clothing changes, and daily necessities. Oh yes, and my family. And my birth certificate.
The books I’d be most likely to try to save would be my well-loved and highlighted copies of Don Quixote and Les Miserables, the harder to replace sequels to The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, from an obscure little press that I could only get in the first place because they had a booth at ALA last year.
I have several videos I couldn’t replace, because they were filmed by people smuggling cameras into Broadway theatres. I’d probably go for Take Me Out first, because it’s my favorite play, and because it’s not a musical and therefore there isn’t even a partial legal recording of any cast.
I might try to grab the audio cassette recording of John Lithgow and B.D. Wong in M Butterfly, too. That’s legal, but hard to get your hands on these days.
I think I’d throw my cookbooks INTO the basement if it were flooding. I would save recipe cards written by women I have loved (Grandma, Mom, an ex-boss).
I would save photo albums, pictures, stuff from my Grandparents (Grandma’s pearls, Great-Grandma’s brownie camera) and the animals.
Books, though I’d hate losing them, are replaceable. I am not so attached to any of them that I’d risk drowning to save them.
Sam…
Well, since I ran outside during a tornado about a month ago to rescue the cat and didn’t even think about grabbing the computer…
But, provided that I’m thinking a bit more clearly next time? I’d leave the cat because he’s being stubborn and not eating his new food, the special raw food I’m making FRESH for him EVERY FRICKIN DAY, and I’d grab my computer and the picture album instead. Oh, gods, I’d so grab the computer. There’s… well, everything on it. I need it. My preciousssss!
As for books… hmm. I don’t really have anything that can’t be replaced. I’d grab the Harry Potter books on CD that I’ve got in a binder—hello, those fucking books cost about $70 each, there’s 6 of them in the binder, that’s a shitload of money! Other than that? Nothing much. I can replace everything.
Actually, maybe next time I’ll be smart and not run outside in a tornado at all. There’s a thought.
Probably only my copy of The Handmaid’s Tale. Because of the notes in the margin from college (plus, it’s one of my all-time favs).
My father-in-law helped us move a few years back, and I begged him to use the camper shell thing to cover the back of his pickup truck. He insisted that everything would be fine. Upon arrival all of the cardboard boxes of books were wet. Nothing was destroyed, but almost all of the books were damaged. I had to leave the room and cry (I also had to repress the violence I felt). It hurts my heart to think of it. Now everything travels in Rubbermaid!