Online Book Shopping Side-Effects

It is probably really too much like hoarding, but if that's what it's gonna be, that's me. I confess. I get on jags where I want to find out about something and I spend huge chunks of time chasing stuff down. Back when I was a kid it was the local library, magazines, a monstrous pile of imagination & observation of tedious detail that I never showered on homework or household chores.
     Built a sitar once, I did.
     But nowadays most of my collection (or hoarding, if you must) consists of things. Radios is one. I've got . . . seventeen. Radios. Back in the day I had records too. They went out of style when digital came in but I still have a handful. Original Sargent Pepper's, one of those. Three shelves of their CD equivalents now on the wall, comes to around 150. And yeah, I know, some kids have more than that.
     I just figured out how to rip and burn music to a thumb drive today, dammit.
     But it's the books that come in the highest count. And back before someone upgraded my library file software, I know that there were over 700 books that I had catalogued. Seven hundred that I got catalogued covered everything from The Book of Mormon to two copies of Fulcher & Long's English-Esperanto Dictionary. That and a copy of Plena Vortaro de Esperanto kun Suplemento from Sennacieca Asocio Tutmondo (World Non-nationalist Association) in Paris.

And that was before the InterWeb.

Somewhere around 1990 I bought something online for the first time. Some kind of radio doodad, if memory serves. Shortly after that I bought some books. Then CDs. Then a milspec camera bag, followed ever since by tons of stuff.
     So far I ain't bought any cats online. Good thing too. I already have four inside and something like six or seven outside.
     Books, however, are still another problem.
     Just today I got a copy of W. S. Milne's A Practical Bengali Grammar. It's a reprint of the original 1913 edition, the source of which is not noted. This adds to the copy of Wickremasinghe's Tamil Self-Taught, also a reprint of a 1911 book. Both of these reprints came from Asian Educational Services of New Delhi & Madras, which books are available – along with a bunch of other interesting items from the Indian subcontinent – from Khazana, a store "located in the heart of downtown Minneapolis on Marquette Avenue, between 10th and 11th streets, across the Minneapolis Hilton Hotel."
     Now the problem with this knowledge is its being more dangerous than Amazon.com. Like this is the list of books that I've picked up on in Khazana's present inventory:

• Tisdall's Simplified Grammar of the Gujarati Language of 1930-something, 190pp, $23.00 hardcover.
  
• Greaves' Hindi Grammar, 566pp, $43 hardcover.
  
• Brown's The Grammar of the Telugu Language, 392pp, $37, hardcover.
  
• Fronhmeyer's Progressive Grammar of the Malayalam Language, 322pp, hardcover.
  
• Gundert's A Grammar of the Malayalam Language, 448pp, $30, hardcover.

And then there's these 'ns:

• Peck's Eskimo Grammar, 100pp, $23, hardcover.
  
• Schmidt's Grammatik der Mongolischen Sprache, 180pp, $47, hardcover.

Which wouldn't be so bad 'cept Khazana also carries musical instruments, various statues of Hindu deities, devotional items &c.
     As if I ain't got enough stuff the way it is.
     Now I'd bring this up only for a couple reasons. One of which is what the hell is gonna happen to this stuff when I snuff it.
     I'd like to think it would go on to some better purpose, being as how I will have by then gone on to reintegrate my molecular self with the rest of what's left of this planet by the time I do snuff it.
     All the language books, well, them I give to the university where I work. Special collection: languages & other crap. Politics of experience & all that, religion books, them I ain't too worried about. It's the language books that I worry for. After all, it ain't every university library will be able to claim the ownership of Schmidt's Grammatik der Mongolischen Sprache or Iversen's Norrøn grammatikk. Or a pristine copy the nearly useful but plainly over-simplified Hugo's Hindustani Simplified.
     Not to mention the complete series of Hugo's language manuals themselves, a couple of 'em in duplicates. Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and the very nearly rare Hugo's Dutch Simplified.
     All of that, dictionaries and grammars and the history of various languages, language families &c, all of that is, at least to me, pretty important. Some of it is the only source for knowledge on languages that may some day be as snuffed as I'll be by the time the books end up in the special collections shelves.
     I mean, when's the last time you saw a copy of Schmidt's book on Mongolian?
     In German?
     That's what I mean.

At the same time I bring this up because I'm a firm believer that there must be other idiots like myself out here, hoarding cats and books and radios and CDs full of Puerto Rican salsa. Believing such makes my mentioning of this information and the sources part of a program that makes sense all the way around.
     If there are indeed others like me, I'm leaving a trail of bread crumbs by which others will be able to get their own damn copy of Schmidt's Grammatik der Mongolischen Sprache. In the original German. Printed in Madras or New Delhi.
     Among other afflictions.
     At the same time, if you're wondering how much space this takes up in my vast estate on the pampas of the American Midwest, you may be shocked to know that I have all this crap stuffed into a room 12 ft long and 8 ft wide. With a window.
     There are three book cases on the back and side walls. The other wall, covered it with ugly green striped wallpaper, carries the load of heavy-duty bookshelves that also hold half of the radios (the ones that work) and all the books and other accretia that I have yet to find places for.
     Which explains my concern of what happens after I snuff it.
     The average person would think this was a junk room, one of those places you let the kids loose in so they can screw up and screw around without, one might hope, setting the house on fire or otherwise destroying the furniture, carpets, curtains &c. That is, after all, pretty much what it looks like.
     But that ain't what it is, see?
     It's the place I hide out in – not including the garage print shop & the former radio room/radio shack – and dream stuff up or read stuff or come up with weird ideas or – which is probably the whole starting point for this rant – buy stuff online. And see what it is that I can buy later online when I have saved up enough money. Or after I've come down from whatever is the present jag.
     How this fits with language and linguistics is anybody's guess. To be sure, if you came here to read about language & linguistics, the worst case scenario is you've discovered a source for a book in German on the Mongolian language. That or you've discovered that for what you spent on radios you could have bought a real, made-in-India surbahar. Even if you lost the four volume set of Sambamoorthy's South Indian Music you picked up back in the 60s.

Not that I could afford a Sarasvati Vīna anyway.

Of course the other half of this dreamscape is the question of what will become of libraries themselves by the time I do slip free these corporeal bonds. Today you can go to any library and spend more time getting what you want off the screen from which you are likely reading this.
     Books on shelves take up space and resources. Libraries spend tons of loot on keeping the air in the place sufficiently dry or moist or whatever so the paper doesn't dry out and the books go to dust. (Saying that I'm reminded of the scene in the 1950s version of H. G. Wells' Time Machine where the main character runs his hand through a shelf full of books, each book of which collapses into a cloud of dust.) Any more many academic libraries don't even have half their collection in the building. The university where I work has a set-up with other libraries in the area for storage of books in a giant warehouse, from which any library patron can borrow a book from any library in the system.
     If you want it today, you're out of luck.
     "No glot! Come fly-day!"
     I don't expect that situation to change. In fact, I expect warehousing books to become a standard set-up. From that I expect that books will be turned into PDFs or some other easy to manipulate file system so the book can be read off the screen.
     In many ways the printed books that Khazana gets from Asian Educational Services are only one step away from the digital. AES produces books from offset repros of what was originally a book set in type and printed the old-fashioned way: paper against type & ink. Huge copy machines are available in the "First World" that produce books on demand, one at a time or in multi-copy press runs that look all the world like books from "serious" book printers. Most college textbooks are puked out that way, which doesn't explain the exorbitant cost of the books to the students.
     Digitalized books, once thought strange and unmanageable, are getting more common. Some books are presently available that way from Amazon.com. Others show up in Google searches. It's becoming an every-day deal.
     In the end my collection of paper and paste board is going to be worthless anyway. But the thought that somewhere there will be a character left over from an episode of Twilight Zone who enjoys sitting down with a book to quietly read off the page from reflected light, apart from the hum of cooling fans and the flicker of the screen filling the room.

Some people have imaginary friends; I have these books. Best part is: they don't need batteries. Even if I do write about 'em on this screen.