the corner office

The dearest and I are bookish kinds of people, and the one precious commodity in our home is real estate for all our bookshelves, and I'm the proud owner of heaps of old and shabby books, some of which I've owned for 15+ years or more, but still not gotten around to reading.

(Though I mean to, eventually, promise.)

All of this didn't keep my first ever visit to UNISA's library today from turning into something of a depressing affair. (And no, I don't mean depressing because it's only as a final year Honours student that I finally set foot in the library, having relied on my own purchased textbooks for all these years, although that is tangentially part of the depressing bit).

Libraries are meant to be a celebration of books, a huge store of amassed knowledge, waiting for people to partake, to learn. Problem is, what are they if they're just lifeless warehouses of books, sitting on shelves, that nobody really cares about?

I'm doing a project this year on Linear Programming, and I was blown away by how many books UNISA had on the subject. I checked out a small mountain of books, but my books were a fraction of the number of LP books sitting on the shelves. Many of those books, though, have been sitting there for decades, and I was blown away to see that some of them haven't been checked out for 20 years or more.

It's just the nature of things, I guess, but it strikes me as kind of sad. You pour years of your life and experience into a book, and perhaps a few academics soak it up, and then copies of your book just sit and gather dust in libraries for decades, until long after you're dead. It just seems a little pointless.