Personal libraries can include almost anything, although books may be the most typical components. Here are six academics’ comments on what’s in their libraries.
Joe Saltzman Director Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture Project Professor of Journalism University of Southern California
I’ve always been fascinated by the images of journalists in popular culture. I believe that those images influence the public’s opinion about the news media and their effectiveness more than most journalists or scholars have realized. Americans’ lack of confidence in the media comes partly from real life, but partly from negative images in movies, television, and fiction. But more than that, I love this stuff -- including The Front Page, starring Jack Lemmon as a reporter and Walter Matthau as his editor (shown in color on the screen on my desk), and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, with Jean Arthur and George Bancroft as reporter and editor (shown in black and white).
I spend about four hours every day adding to my collection, which includes more than 14,000 movies; 11,000 TV programs; 8,500 novels and short stories; and 3,000 cartoons, comic books, and comic strips. It is the largest collection ever assembled of video and fiction about journalists.
The future is extremely bright for my collection, which has become the basis of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture, a project of the Norman Lear Center in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. The project was created in 2000 to demonstrate the impact of popular culture on the public’s perception of journalists. This is a long-neglected field of research, rich with untapped material.
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Eriberto P. Lozada Jr. Assistant Professor of Anthropology Davidson College
As a sociocultural anthropologist, I started using advertisements in 1994 as part of my research on the impact of fast-food culture in Beijing. I collected everything from newspaper advertisements to the paper mats used by different fast-food outlets, to document how Western and Chinese fast-food companies were marketing themselves in China. Advertisements are carefully crafted media, replete with cultural information that reflects not only the strategies of advertising professionals and businesses, but also the cultural assumptions and perspectives of their consumers, which the advertisers research extensively.
When I started teaching undergraduates in liberal-arts colleges in 1999, I found that advertisements -- especially television commercials -- were a great way to illustrate and reinforce points that I made in my lectures, so I expanded my collection of ads. Most of the advertisements I have are from the United States and other Western countries, but I also have many Asian and Latin American commercials. I especially like to collect sports-related commercials, including those that feature Chinese athletes like the basketball player Yao Ming and the soccer star Sun Wen.
When I teach about Chinese society and culture, one of my goals is to make China less exotic for my students, many of whom have not been to the country. I want the students to understand the everyday strategies and hopes of people in contemporary China, and the unfamiliar social structures and cultural practices within which they pursue their dreams.
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Tony Elam Associate Dean George R. Brown School of Engineering Rice University
I’ve always enjoyed games and been fascinated by them. Growing up in a small town in rural Louisiana, I had access only to standard, mass-market games like chess, Sorry, Clue, and Monopoly. My love of military history and interest in games led me to create my own war games in high school.
I have to credit my wife with starting my collection, with a game she bought me in 1971. I now have over 5,800 games. They include board games from the late 1800s to the present; role-playing games, a genre that began in the 1970s with Dungeons & Dragons; and collectible card games, which became popular in the 1990s.
My current focus is on European games, which in general are more innovative than American games, and many of which are beautiful, with great artwork and wooden components. Hundreds of new European games are produced each year. A few American companies have finally become aware of those products and are translating the rules and importing them to the United States.
I enjoy studying games (their artwork, history, rules, and mechanics) and the social interactions of the players. Many games are excellent tools for education and training. And because they represent the interests and values of their societies, games are snapshots in time.
Even though I own many games that I have not played, I try to read the rules to each one. One day I hope to set up an online resource on the history of games and donate my collection to a university, but before then I would love to play all the games.
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Edward R. Ford Professor of Architecture University of Virginia
I have never lived in a place where there were not piles of books on the floor of every room. Thus when I designed my own house, it was apparent that a separate library would become little more than a storeroom: The books would rapidly migrate to wherever the family happened to be. So I began with the idea that the book space and the living space should be one. The quality I most admire in the library buildings I love, like the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris or the Stockholm public library, is the way the books become the architecture. The rooms are not filled with books; they are made of books. I wanted, on a smaller scale, to do the same.
Most of the house is built of heavy timber and wood, but the larger spaces with the greater structural loads have an additional steel frame, and the large green beams and tubes make possible the balconies over the main living space and the butterfly roof, lifted so that natural light enters on all four sides.
The creation of the collection itself was a less-deliberate process. I decided I was a collector only when I realized I owned more books that I could ever read. The collection tends heavily toward architecture and building construction in the 19th and 20th centuries, my primary area of study. Finally having all my books in one space was revealing. I discovered that I owned three copies of Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a book I have never read.
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Jennie Meade Bibliographer and Rare Books Librarian Jacob Burns Law Library George Washington University
My first memories are of horses and books; riding and reading followed quickly. As a child I was an indiscriminate collector of horse books. Later I focused on works by farriers and treatises on classical equitation and sporting topics.
Today the farrier is a person who shoes horses. But historically the farrier was a horse doctor and equestrian jack-of-all-trades. Books by farriers were invaluable to owners of horses and stable managers well into the 19th century. The books are often found now in well-thumbed to battered condition. Many survive today because so many were published, chiefly in England and the United States. In contrast, the masters of classical equitation mainly published their writings in France, Italy, and Germany.
My collection includes nearly 300 antiquarian books, dating from the mid-16th through the 19th century. It surprises some people that I consider my antiquarian books a reference collection. Although many of the quaint veterinary recipes are outdated (some even harmful), I refer frequently to the descriptions of equine ailments, treatments, and training in managing my own horses. Insights from early practitioners sometimes can supplement information from modern veterinary and training texts.
As a rare books librarian who lives on a horse farm, I seem to have found my collecting niche. Certainly the chase of collection building has its own special allure. But more important is the goal, however modest: to preserve a dimension of history by bringing these books together, with the hope that future readers might enjoy and benefit from them as I have.
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Torild M. Homstad Instructor of Norwegian St. Olaf College
Reading has always been a central activity in my life, and I have a personal relationship with each book in my collection. A book of Viking tales and a volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems are the foundation of my library, which includes books in every room in my home in Northfield, Minn. My grandmother gave me the Viking book when I learned to read, and it sparked my interest in Norway and Norwegian literature. Millay’s volume, a gift from my mother when I was a teenager, awakened my love of poetry.
My grandfather, the Norwegian-American writer O.E. Rølvaag, built the house where I live; originally the library contained a collection of translations of his works into various languages, including Dutch and Urdu. My family recently donated those translations to the Norwegian-American Historical Association archives in the St. Olaf College library. I have continued to collect different editions of his books in Norwegian and English, to be passed on to the next generation.
My eclectic collection also includes mysteries, feminist literature, books on books and writing, and many children’s books in Norwegian and English. The word “collection” seems a bit pretentious as I have acquired many books on impulse, because something about a volume -- perhaps just the cover art -- intrigued me. I have discovered many wonderful books in that way.
I have ambitions of someday organizing my library by genre, but I like being able to pick a book from the shelf at random. My library also contains my grandfather’s pipe and a stuffed donkey, a memento of my uncle Karl Rølvaag’s 91-vote recount victory in the 1962 Minnesota gubernatorial election.
http://chronicle.com Section: Libraries Volume 52, Issue 6, Page B16