New Project

One of my 2009 projects was to organize and catalog all the books we have in our library – about 1,500 in all. (There are probably another thousand in the basement, but that’ll be a project for another day.) I found some software called Book Collector that enabled me to enter each book and sort them by location or author or subject. So if I want to know what’s on, say, shelf D-8 I can do that. Or if I want to know which books I have written by David Halberstam and where they are I can quickly find them.

I completed the project in September. To get the job done obviously I needed to pick up and look at each and every book we have. In that process I realized we are blessed with some fabulous volumes that I haven’t looked at in years or even decades. Many I’d forgotten were here. We have dozens of art books from all over the world, books with extraordinary photographs, catalogs from museum exhibitions we loved, and more. Some are very old.

I was inspired to want to sit down and look at them closely. And so another project was born that I’m beginning now and will continue through next year. I have much to look at and some have a lot of text as well as pictures. I’m not sure how much I’ll read – that I’ll play by ear. But I am sure I’ll look at each and every image. I’m really excited at the prospect.

Just now I decided to begin with a shelf that has 30 books. The titles include:

Bhutan

Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya

Great Cathedrals

Islamic Art & Architecture

The Complete Michelangelo

Rabindranath Tagore

This is like finding a long-lost hidden treasure.