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Thread: My Library is terrible.

  1. #1
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    My Library is terrible.

    I have a list of 47 books.

    Out of all of those they only carry SlaughterHouse-Five, Brave New World, Farenheit 451 and a H. G. Wells collection. Got it for The Sleeper awakes. No Shape of things To Come though.

  2. #2
    The Poetic Warrior Dark Muse's Avatar
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    That is like the library at the university I go to. The library where I attended community college was really good and I spent a lot of time there, but the library at the university is lame and a joke. I have only stepped into it a couple of times.

    Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

  3. #3
    Registered User Tallon's Avatar
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    I've only found one library in my city and its outlying towns which has any decent fiction in it. Most have no Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, etc. at all, only genre fiction. It's really terrible.

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    Yeah everything I searched for in their catalog besides what I found was either in miamisburg (5 minutes away), Dayton (15), Troy (an hour) or trotwood (20 minutes away)

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    Wandering Child Annamariah's Avatar
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    Can't the books you're looking for be delivered from another library?

    At least where I come from you're not supposed to find every single book you might be looking for in one library, but for 0.50 euros they'll get you whichever book you're looking from another library and you can come and pick it up in a few days (unless, of course, there are a lot of people after the same book and no copies are available at the moment, then you'll have to wait for a bit longer).
    Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing. Her hair was golden as the sun's rays and her soul as clear and blue as her eyes.
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    Registered User DaveB's Avatar
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    My library is fiction-deprived too. We have a system called Inter Library Loan (ILL) which allows us to search a large number of library catalogs and request that a book be loaned to us via our local library. It costs $1.50 USD per book and takes around a week. It eliminates spontaneity from my choices, but at least I can get the books I really want to read.

    Recent genre fiction is, of course, plentiful at my library. Classics? Forget it!
    If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.

    - Mark Twain

  7. #7
    Bat Country Hank Stamper's Avatar
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    I visited my local library about a year ago after moving back to the area where I grew up.. there seems to be more DVDs and magazines than books.. not how I remember it from when I was younger! Our local bookshop is pretty good tho, even tho it doesn't carry a great deal of stock, what it does sell is generally high quality
    When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro

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    Artist and Bibliophile stlukesguild's Avatar
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    NecroCombine666... how long of a commute is Columbus? I would assume (although I could be wrong... ) that they have a major library. Obviously in Cleveland I have access to a world-class library... and even more so Virgil in New York. Outside of research for college courses, I must admit to rarely using the library. I prefer to own any book I read because I am almost certain to wish to refer to it again at some time.
    Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
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    Bibliophile JBI's Avatar
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    The library at my university, well the big one anyway, there are many, is of Borgesian Proportions. My personal has about 80 books that I would consider noteworthy, I kind of shoved all my other books into the waste basket as I decided they weren't worth keeping.

    Only one first edition, and that is of Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage. Got it from 2 dollars .

    I think though my most prized book is my Canti by Leopardi in the original - the Garzanti edition, with the extremely wide range of critical notes (an incredible little bit of scholarship, the Garzanti publishing series on poets is fantastic) and perhaps my Twentieth Century Italian Poetry, an Anthology edited by John Picchione and Lawrence R. Smith, which offers the poems in Italian, with extensive notes in English.

    I think I'm rather lucky, relative to other people - I have the TPL which is essentially all-containing, and I have the Robarts Library, which virtually has everything, though isn't by any means public. I think the best way around not having libraries is to convince your friends to like what you like, and then simply trade books. I'm sure there are people out there who like the same works as you, so it shouldn't be too difficult.
    Last edited by JBI; 12-03-2008 at 02:11 PM.

  10. #10
    Registered User kelby_lake's Avatar
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    Local libraries are generally not great but order out of county.

  11. #11
    Bibliophile JBI's Avatar
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    I don't know - I have the best local library - I get every book I want for a month without worrying. IT depends how big the municipality that you are in is, and how library-focused your country is.

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    sorry i forgot about this site for quite a while. Columbus is 2 hrs away.

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    Card-carrying Medievalist Lokasenna's Avatar
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    I don't know what its like in the States, but in Britain you can go into a library and ask them to buy any book for you, and they will; you don't even pay a penny (except in taxes, obviously).
    "I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance. And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity- through him all things fall. Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of gravity!" - Nietzsche

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lokasenna View Post
    I don't know what its like in the States, but in Britain you can go into a library and ask them to buy any book for you, and they will; you don't even pay a penny (except in taxes, obviously).
    In theory maybe. I used to work in Public Libraries, (I'm now a School Librarian), and there is a very tight balancing act. We used to have our Book Fund cut every year, but at the same time we always encouraged our borrowers to suggest things, not just on what books to buy. The level of interaction, (or the encouraging of it) between the service and the users was very good, but in real terms, if they bought everything everyone suggested.... well they couldn't in reality. I know there was special collections in my area, for example where they took a group of teenagers and got them to buy books. But I don't think it could work across the board, as I remember with dismay the almost daily discussions, often heated, from certain members of the public about which newspapers we bought. As a smallish branch Library, we only had a selection, but that never pleased everyone, and I remember a couple of incidents in particular, such as a very arrogant man who was not even a regular user of the Library, demanding that he got a certain paper. What happened? We duly ordered it and never saw him again, and another one who shouted loudly every day about what he wanted and which he never got .

    My own personal Library is probably over a thousand. I am an avid collector, but I haven't read them all, unfortunately. I live by that quote from Borges(?)
    "I have always imagined Heaven to be a kind of Library."

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    I've found that buying through Amazon (or, I suppose, any of the similar websites) is a good option. I've made a good library for myself, very seldom breaking my self-imposed rule of never buying a book that costs more than one buck.

    Since I live in a Spanish-speaking environment, it's difficult to find English-language books in the libraries. So this was a life-changing option for me. I had access to books I would otherwise never have been able to read.

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