Bookshelf; the perversions of a bibliophile

After a rather difficult year, I find myself doing one of my periodic life assessments - a magical retirement, or a period of silence, if you will; I am surrounded by the detritus of lives past and enticed by new interests. Should I write a fugue? Do more writing on my books, perhaps even finish one? Change careeers and sell more of my time for money? One of the events I see moving towards me is a change in accommodation at some time in the future, and so my library, once a comfortable nest to keep out the barbarians, is beginning to look a little like a heavy load I'm carrying around.

There is of course the expensive section, which will largely be retained no matter what. Quality books define something about me that has always been core to my personality. I have bought these when rich and when poor, and sometimes, buying a second copy and later selling it has even provided a little more cash to buy more. This section is largely populated by Grimoires, Austin Spare books and books that are best described as Sorcery, mostly recently published by publishers who take publishing such books very seriously, as indeed they should.

Then we have sections on Sacred Geometry, Myths, Psychology, Religion, Magical Languages and Symbols, the usual Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant, Shamanism, Mysteries of the Past, before we finally frill off into Kitchen Witchery and whatnot. Thats of course not counting my fiction and science sections.

Frankly, I believe that I could honestly lose about 60% of my books and retain a strong core. But of course writing books leads to the inevitable excuse "but I might want to consult that book someday". Then there are the books I just want to be around, all those cheap and rather repetitive and imitative sorcery books. Its just so hard to know where to start. Perhaps 10% of my collection I haven't even read yet, largely because although I want to know whats in them, they will take some slogging through - "The White Goddess" is a fairly typical example, as well as some books by Eliade, etc.

They will likely find my corpse under a mountain of books; probably those that find me will not know or care of the value the books hold, and donate them all to Goodwill or a public library, to be sold off as junk to Christians, who will buy them to burn.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.