Check it out
Posted by Nick Milne on September 18, 2008
For the sake of general interest, here are two photographs of my living space. Click on them to enlarge.
ASTONISHING ADDENDUM: Yes, I have a digital camera. I had forgotten all about it for a very long time, though, and didn’t have any batteries for it besides, but that’s all changed now, changed utterly.
The first shows the “reading cranny” produced by the enormous bookshelf:
I regret that it looks far smaller than it actually is.
The second shows the other side of that bookshelf, which puts it into better perspective for size:
Everything else in my apartment is too boring or utilitarian to be photographed, and will thus be left to the imagination. Pictures of other things and of the city proper may follow at some point in the near future.
Maid of La Mancha said
Man – you give us a picture of a bookcase, but expanded, it’s too fuzzy to actually read the titles. Sadist.
Nick Milne said
There are too many on the off-angle one for me to go through, but, since you seem put out, here’s the list from the second picture. I’m not actually in front of it right now, though, so I’ll just have to go by what I remember:
(from left to right)
First row
1. Complete diaries and some letters of Nicholas, Alexandra, and their extended family.
2. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
3. One of Alistair McGrath’s theology textbooks
4. Bruce Meyer’s The Golden Thread
5. James de Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
6. Paradise Lost
7. Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond
8. Montaigne’s Essays
9. Not sure
10. Alan Moore’s Watchmen
11. Murphy’s translation of the Heliand
12. Nabokov’s Pale Fire
13. Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua
14. Newman’s The Idea of a University
15. Newman’s The Uses of Knowledge
16. Aidan Nichols’ Christendom Awake
17. A collection of Nietzsche’s basic works
18. The Church Visible (forget author name)
19. Flannery O’Connor’s complete stories
Lying on top: Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual
20. Flannery O’Connor’s two novels in a single volume
21. Four volumes of Brian Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series
22. Probably Ovid’s Metamorphoses
23. The Borroff translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
24. Pascal’s Pensees
25. Walter Pater’s The Renaissance
26. Joseph Pearce’s Literary Converts
27. Joseph Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture
28. Pilch and Malina’s Handbook of Biblical Social Values
29. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
30. Some of Plato’s dialogues concerning the last days of Socrates
31. Some of Plutarch’s lives
32. Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa
Two small volumes lying on top: brief introductions to fascism and logic
33. Ezra Pound’s Cantos
34. Ezra Pound’s collected early poetry
35. Ezra Pound’s Confucian Odes
36. Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur
37. Ezra Pound’s Literary Essays
38. Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems
39. Terry Pratchett’s The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld
40. Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel
41. John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World
42. Riordan’s Plunkitt of Tammany Hall
43. Fr. Rolfe’s Hadrian VII
44. Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute
45. Bertrand Russell’s Unpopular Essays
46. The complete works of Saki
47. George Sayer’s Jack (C.S. Lewis biography)
48. Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Man Born to Be King
49. Dorothy L. Sayers’ translation of the Song of Roland
50. James V. Schall’s Another Sort of Learning
51. Schneidau’s Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real
52. E.F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed
53. Duncan Campbell Scott’s In the Village of Viger
54. Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels
55. King Lear
Second Row
56. One of two books about George Bernard Shaw
57. The second of two books about George Bernard Shaw
58. Original 1818 version of Frankenstein
59. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
60. The Manga Bible. That’s right.
61. Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914
62. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago
63. Solzhenitsyn’s For the Good of the Cause (out of order, apparently)
64. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
65. A Solzhenitsyn Reader (lots of speeches and whatnot)
66. Some of Solzhenitsyn’s short stories and prose poems
67. Oedipus Tyrannus
68. The Faerie Queene
69. Art Spiegelman’s Maus
70. Robert Spitzer’s Healing the Culture
71. John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley
72. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
73. Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia
Three on top: Not sure, Trotsky’s manual on terrorism, the romances of Chretien de Troyes
74. Tall black book (not sure)
75. Tennyson’s In Memoriam
76. Thucydides’ histories
77. Two copies of The Hobbit
78. The Lord of the Rings
79. A Tolkien Miscellany (lots of neat stuff)
80. Complete humorous sketches and short stories of Mark Twain
81. Complete unabridged Twain, Vol. 1
82. Complete unabridged Twain, Vol. 2
83. Waugh’s Edmund Campion
Lying on top: David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
84. Waid/Ross’ Kingdom Come
85. Maisie Ward’s biography of Chesterton
86. Richard M. Weaver’s Ethics of Rhetoric (I think)
87. Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
88. Some of Oscar Wilde’s short fiction and poetry
89. Charles Williams’ All Hallow’s Eve
90. Complete trade collection of Willingham/Buckingham’s excellent comic series, Fables
91. Garry Wills (alas)’ biography of Chesterton
92. A.N. Wilson’s biography of Belloc
93. Not sure
94. Ben Witherington III’s What Have They Done With Jesus?
95. Wood/Cloonan’s Demo
96. N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God
97. Not sure
98. Virgil’s Aeneid
99. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s A Theology of History
100. One of Xenophon’s histories
101. Chuck Zerby’s The Devil’s Details
Third row (sort of out of view)
102. Norton Anthology of American Literature
One on top: a book of archaic calligraphy
103. Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound
104. Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction
105. Cambridge Companion to Milton
106. Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson
107. Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies
108. Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy
109. Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory
110. Literary Criticism from Plato to Dryden
111. A volume of the McSweeney’s journal
112. Two journals from the University of Western Ontario featuring my work
113. Not sure
114. Norton Anthology of English Literature
Lying on top: Catechism of the Council of Trent
115. Harper-Collins Study Bible (useful for the extensive footnotes)
116. The Ignatius Press Bible (much better otherwise)
117. Strong’s Concordance
118. Nelson’s Bible Dictionary
119. The Catechism
120. The Documents of the Second Vatican Council
121. The Norton complete Shakespeare
122. Compendium to the Catechism
123. Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism
124. Writings of the Early Church Fathers
125. E.V. Rieu’s translation of the Gospels
126. The Koran
127. The Code of Canon Law (dual language Latin/English)
128. Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism
That should cover it. The two sitting on the little table just out of frame are Robert Alter’s book on the art of biblical narrative and Hans Frei’s book on how that art was briefly eclipsed in the nineteenth century. I’m not sure what the third one just poking in on the left is.
I hope this pleaseth you all much