Happy Monday!

So I’ve been think lately about Knitting Books. There was a topic on Knitter’s Review where people were discussing how many knitting books they own and in some cases which ones. This list got me thinking about my own library and what books might be missing from it. From there it was a small leap to publisher’s lists of books on knitting and ultimately to ebay . . . which we know is the road to ruin!

I’ve always been someone who collects books. I blame this on both my parents, as they too are both people who love books and we always had piles of them in the house when I was a child. They had a range of interests between them with the main overlap being in the Murder Mystery department, though there were others. We each had shelves in the living room for our own collections and the shelves were always overflowing, sometimes literally. My brothers don’t seem to have this collecting gene. They like books well enough and have some on certain topics, but they don’t feel the need to own every book on a topic the way I do. I seem to have gotten a double does of this gene since it came from both sides, much to my husband’s dismay.

When I moved in with my husband he had to put up 64 ft of shelving in the room we use as an office (which will soon by my fiber arts studio) so we would have some place to put all my books. Books were by far the largest quantity of any one thing I moved this last time. I had something like 35 cartons of them! And that was something like 4 year ago . . . We’ve cleaned through the books a couple of times and made adjustments to the collection based on our changing interests. Donated large quantities of paperbacks and some other books that we’ve simply outgrown the need for and given still others away to friends and neighbors. And yet, somehow, I find that the shelves are simply over flowing again! In place, certain topics have been compacted to a double deep, double high area to make room for new interests. Knitting and Spinning (and weaving, crochet and all the other fiber related arts) are one of the topics that have been expanding rapidly over the past few years. When you add magazines to the pictures it can easily grow almost exponentially.

I’m putting together a book list, for my PDA, to include both the books I have and the books I want. So far I’ve got about 60 books on it and those are mostly things I want, or have ordered. Now I need to catalog the books I already have so I won’t accidentially buy the same one twice! Its strange what happens when 3 of your favorite hobbies collide, the intersection of being a collector, loving books and being a knitter & spinner can certainly create the need for more space!

I had done the same thing with needles but I keep buying more and forgetting to update the list so I may have to do that one all over again. Perhaps I’ll find time for that one of the days I’m home since work is taking a winter break from Christmas until the Monday after New Years. . . .

One of the other questions on that same KR forum was if you could only have 2 books what would they be? For me, I think the Ann Budd’s pattern book with the gauge/size tables and one of Barbara Walker’s stitch dictionaries. What about you, which two would you want if you could only have 2 books?