Dealing With Book Acquisition Disorder

My name is Don, and I have Book Acquisition Disorder.  In the midst of relocating for the first time since finishing college, this is a pretty weighty and voluminous problem.

I am of a generation and tradition that likes to possess books, lots of books, and to actually read them.  (Well, I used to read a lot, before my eyes started going south I would typically read 200-500 pages a day.)  To make things worse (?) whenever I head off down another rabbit trail — I am not ADHD, I am merely hyper-curious — I make a point of obtaining as much as possible that is written on the subject.  The result?  An estimated 2,000 books (?) about artistry, craftsmanship, chemistry and materials science.

When emptying my office in December after almost three decades working in the same facility it required four pickup truck loads to transport all those books the The Barn.  Add to that inventory the huge pile of my books from home, probably even more than at the office, and you get a sense of the scale of the headache.

Compounding the problem is the fact that Mrs. Don has the affliction to the same degree but on entirely unrelated topics for the most part, so between the two of us we have a big problem on our hands.

The only practical way of dealing with this particular challenge is to transform a chunk of the barn into a full blown library, more precisely, the entire south third floor balcony.  When finished the space will include almost 300 feet of shelving for books, with a single-slab trestle table measuring 16’ x 30” x 2” in the center of the space made from a ~150-year-old Eastern White Pine board I’ve been saving 30 years for just this moment.

Creating the Barn Biblioteca will take several months and many blog posts, so stay tuned.