Tag Archives: Libib

Read-in

Still working (leisurely) on cataloging the books into Libib (pronounced, btw, from Libib’s FAQs: “luh-bib. For you IPA people, relish the schwa: ləbib”). At first I thought they were talking about India Pale Ale.

Categories and Tags – this is where things get swiftly tricky, like getting caught in a riptide. Libib recommends not using genres as categories, but something more personally identifiable, so that I might put one collection into a category called basement books, a collection being a subset of the library, and where to find a book of paramount concern. Or green bookcase. This might make sense for my library, since the books are spread throughout the house with little to no regard for genre or author. Though there is some organization, a row of paperbacks I’ve had since high school, for example. The green bookcase holds primarily poetry and plays. Nevertheless, I’ve decided upon genres as categories. But how many? Is biography considered non-fiction, or should it have its own collection (a collection and category being at this point synonymous)? Most of my books are literary by nature, so a single category of literary would hold them all, which would not be all that helpful in terms of organization and inventory. But less the whole enterprise get subsumed in some sort of biblio neurosis, I’ve decided to go with the following categories of genre: Fiction, Non-fiction, Music, Philosophy, Plays, Poetry. Libib provides a tool to filter: “Not Begun, In Progress, Completed, Abandoned, No Status.” I was thinking I might put all the Samuel Beckett books under Abandoned. In any event, the organization of the library will be in reality only virtual – I’ve no intention of actually physically moving all the books about trying to get them organized by genre or author or whatever. It’s enough to take them down, dust them off, peruse, catalog into Libib, put back – or leave out for further consideration. The library is, after all, not so large that I can’t find something wandering about and searching manually, which is what the hobby, if not the passion, is all about. A library should be a quiet and also unhurried experience.

Tags will be useful and helpful, for example: beat, pocket poets series – which I’ve for the last few days been working on. This morning I came to Robert Bly’s “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,” Number Twenty-Six in the City Lights Series. Bly, born in 1926, passed away last November at the age of 94. Teeth Mother (hyphenated on the title page but not on the cover) is a single poem, 22 pages in this edition (Library of Congress No. 73-11121), 1970 by City Lights Books. Parts of the poem were printed earlier in the Nation and New American Review magazines. In my copy, which I think is a first edition (original cost $1.00), the pages are as thick as the covers of other Pocket Poems books, thick and unbending. I was struck by several things (historical, foreboding, ironic) in the Kenneth Rexroth quote on the back cover:

“For a good many years now in his magazine The Sixties, and its accompanying book publishing Robert Bly has been struggling manfully to return American poetry to the mainstream of international literature from which it was diverted into the sultry provincial bayous of the Pillowcase Headdress School a generation ago. He started out completely surrounded by enemies . . It’s a wonder he’s alive. When he first started to wean away the puling young of America’s heartland from the seventy-seven tits of ambiguity, I thought he didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance. Robert Bly is today [i.e. 1970] one of the leaders of a poetic revival which has returned American literature to the world community . . A wide grasp of experience, an octave or more in each hand, is not just a sign of energy, it is a cause of responsibility. This is what gives the poems their great moral impact.”

Kenneth Rexroth

A Personal Library

How did the plumber’s son, whose father never read a book in his life, come to have about 3,000 books in his collection? I’m not a hoarder. A book must have some sort of meaning for me, an affinity established, which usually can only come from reading the book, before I keep it. Though of course there’s the stack I have not read. Then again there’s the stack read and loaned out and never returned. And a few, held since high school days, open so crisp and dry the pages break. And most of the books are paperback. And the collection taken as a whole is probably not worth much. Though I do have a few books that might be worth something to collectors of that bent. A first edition of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, for example, which a lady once offered $100 for at a garage sale back in the early 80’s. I said no, deciding to keep it. That $100 would have been spent on pizza and beer long ago, but I still have the book, somewhere.

With a bit of extra time on my hands these days, those close to me increasingly independent, and the pandemic still on (and off but on again), and with the easy availability and use of the Libib application, which I mentioned yesterday, I’ve decided to catalog the books, which are spread throughout the house in every room on shelves and bookcases and tables. The 3,000 is pretty much a guestimate, arrived at by counting the books on a couple of average looking shelves, measuring the length of those shelves, and then measuring the total length of shelves. Something like that.

Anyway, today I’ve added but one book to my Libib, spending most of my time reading through it rather than simply cataloging it and going on to the next book, and then distracted by writing up this post.

Here is the catalog info. for that book as I manually input into Libib:

Poetry

Book

Paroles

Jacques Prevert

1958 71 pages (City Lights Books, San Francisco)

Added: 

2022-04-21

Copies: 1

First published 1946, copyright by Les Editions du Point du Jour, Paris, 1947. First published in this edition: July 1958, by arrangement with the Librarie Gallimard. My copy is sixth printing February 1968. Number Nine in The Pocket Poets Series published by City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, California, U.S.A. 94133. Translated with Intro. Note by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (San Francisco, 1964). From the Intro: “I first came upon the poetry of Jacques Prevert written on a paper tablecloth in St. Brieuc in 1944” (3).

No status.

Libib has no category or input for how a plumber’s son came to possess the book. So that I will answer here, maybe tomorrow. I think for now I might enter another book, but first, for those who’ve read this far:

From the Prevert poem titled “Inventory,” page 54.

“One stone
two houses
three ruins
four grave-diggers
one garden
some flowers

one raccoon

a dozen oysters a lemon a loaf of bread
a ray of sunlight
one groundswell
six musicians
one door with doormat
one Mister decorated with the Legion of Honor

one more raccoon…”

Why We Read

“In the tenth book of the Republic, when Plato has completed his final burning denunciation of Poetry, the false Siren, the imitator of things which themselves are shadows, the ally of all that is low and weak in the soul against that which is high and strong, who makes us feed the things we ought to starve and serve the things we ought to rule, he ends with a touch of compunction: ‘We will give her champions, not poets themselves but poet-lovers, an opportunity to make her defence in plain prose and show that she is not only sweet – as we well know – but also helpful to society and the life of man, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. For we shall be gainers, I take it, if this can be proved.’ Aristotle certainly knew the passage, and it looks as if his treatise on poetry was an answer to Plato’s challenge.”

Aristotle: On The Art of Poetry (Translated by Ingram Bywater with a Preface by Gilbert Murray), Oxford, At the Clarendon Press. First Published 1920. My copy reprinted 1967 in Great Britain at the University Press, Oxford, by Vivian Ridler, Printer to the University. Oxford University Press, Ely House, London W . 1. 95 Pages. Light pencil marks by your student reader throughout, this little chapbook size paperback was used as a text at CSUDH, early 1970’s, Prof. Marvin Laser instructor. “Personal Library of…” emboss stamp on first page. The passage quoted above is from Murray’s Preface, page 1.

I’ve been experimenting with a book library app I recently found: Libib, a library management tool, used apparently by professionals and amateurs. (Any comments I make here on the app’s functionality refer to the Libib Basic, i.e. free, version). The app can be downloaded on mobile, tablet, and computer devices and they all sync. I first played around with such an app as volunteer assistant librarian at The Attic back around 2012. There we used Library Thing. Libib is cleaner, efficient, and quick. Books can be scanned via mobile device and barcode. Most of the books in my collection however predate barcodes and current ISBN formats, so must be manually input. If the book has been reprinted in some new edition, you can use that, but it won’t be the same book (edition, print, etc.) as the one in your library. Case in point, the Bywater translation of Aristotle’s “Poetry.” That problem could be workarounded by importing the newer version and then editing the information; alas, the app disallows editing of imported info. Nevertheless, I’m moving forward using the app, even though it means yet another project I’ll never complete.

No matter, what I’ve found is the app provides another purpose, that of perusing, browsing, not to mention dusting off, books that have not been touched let alone read in awhile. The app information can be downloaded into sortable files, should one have a need for such a tool. In any case, I’m currently happily stuck in Aristotle’s examination of poetics. Every page is like opening an oyster and finding a pearl. At random, this:

“The objections, then, of critics start with faults of five kinds: the allegation is always that something is either (1) impossible, (2) improbable, (3) corrupting, (4) contradictory, or (5) against technical correctness.”

92

Yes, I’ll take all five. It’s why we read.