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DiscussAs I went through the door of my apartment, the opening between the literal wall of books at the entrance to our house revealed a brand new bookcase my husband had just made. Eight feet long and three rows high, it fit perfectly between the piano and the smaller black bookcase right next to my desk. The house completely filled with sawdust, we happily set out to finally fight back what I have started referring to as “the book invasion.” And, to our surprise and relative dismay, it turns out we filled the entire thing.
I’m serious. For the past two or three months, the growing amount of random stuff hanging out in our studio is staggering: graded papers, notes, random textbooks I’m not even reading anymore. We’re running out of floor — and I don’t mention desk or table space because that was been claimed weeks ago. We seemed to have lost the battle to the clutter and the overwhelmingness of having to read our way through — and definitely not having enough semester left. But now that the books are nicely packed in a bookcase that I can happily ignore, we can at least pretend that we are sane.
It all started getting out of control around a month ago, after our attendance to the extremely pleasurable — and hence dangerous — Friends of the Library book sale. Now, please, please, please tell me you know what I’m talking about. You do not deserve to say you lived in Ithaca at any point in your life if you ignore this valuable and oh-so-incredible wonder of life. But, alas, almost nobody (at Cornell that is an undergraduate) does. It’s one of those wonderful Ithacan well-kept secrets. I feel free to talk about it only now that it’s over (it will come back, don’t worry. You can still savor its beauty sometime next Spring or Fall).
The Friends of the Library booksale is the biggest and most amazing booksale ever. Existing on book donations that go on year round, the FLB sells everything it’s got at a maximum of $5 the first day and will lower the price on everything every day after that. On the last day of the sale, you can get all the books you can fit into a Wegmans bag for a buck.
And you could say “well, yeah, but so what?” But then, if you do, you haven’t seen it. I’m referring to a booksale that has books you couldn’t find in other bookstores: Books that have gone out of print, wonderful to look at as snapshots of what life was like before we were born sometimes. The rare books collection is a delight, the children’s book section a gold mine for parents or teachers (I’ve found some wonderful material for my young students). The GRE section abounds with those manuals and study guides you wanted to buy online for 30 bucks. The cookbooks are extremely diverse, the LP section to die for. And the specializations sections are incredible. The ornithology books. The literature aisles. Literary theory books on Pynchon ’59, original language editions of Carlos Fuentes or Baudelaire — criticisms included. Rachmaninov music scores. Artbooks and nature photography books that made my skin tingle. Tourist guides for places you haven’t even heard of.
I got Freud and Jung and Piaget and Maslow and Skinner (who all sound tons saner when you read their original works), the Psych 101 textbook, my Biopsych textbook, Guyton’s Physiology, Goodman and Gillman’s Pharmacology, McMurry’s Organic Chemistry and countless others. The whole Agatha Christie and Asimov series, the Stephen King books I read as a teenager, even obscure reads from Joyce or the basic classics that you have to have in any library that prides itself to be one.
The first time we went to FLB was on the day when everything costed 10 cents. We spent 50 dollars and filled the trunk with books. We brought a friend with us and she freaked out and bought around 20 pounds of books and had us send them through media mail to the other side of the country. It was sheer and beautiful momentary madness. I found my inner bibliophile there.
Little did we know about the bookcase requirements that would await us. In the past three years, the library has doubled its size, and we have around a total of eight six-column WalMart sized bookcases filled. That’s a lot of books — around 90 feet if all the books were put in a row next to each other. As maybe you have learned in your time at Cornell, books can take over your house/dorm/room/apartment/co-op in scary and meaningful ways. Which is, I believe, the way it should be.
Just as courses in your life end up having soundtracks (Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” for my Drugs and the Brain class, for instance. Yes, I know how weird that sounds), books in your life should change your life, if only as part of your never-ending personal bucket-booklist. So, if you’re to stay here a while, be sure to hold on to those books — they will make your life different. If you’re about to leave … take what you may with you. And what you can’t, be sure to leave for FLB … you’ll make many a soul extremely happy. Starting with mine.
Florencia Ulloa is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She may be reached at fulloa@cornellsun.com [6]. Innocent Bystander appears alternate Tuesdays this semester.