Library Fun for the Summer

I recently read Emily St. John Mandel’s end-of-the-world novel Station Eleven. I was lured in by the blurb premise that the novel is about a traveling troupe of Shakespeare actors in the wake of a deadly pandemic. As it turns out, the novel doesn’t really do much with the Shakespeare angle, but it is an effective piece of work. One of the interesting little set-pieces in the story is the way a group of survivors sets up a museum of sorts for relics of the world gone by: electronic devices, for instance.

And that got me thinking: of what use could a person such as myself be in an apocalypse? What service could I provide? I’m a professional bookworm! So, if I look at my view every afternoon this month...

...there’s my answer. What kinds of books would I retrieve and try to preserve if things began to go sideways? What in a moderately sized library would be worth saving?

• Shakespeare
• Milton
• Dante
• Homer
• Virgil

…the literary figures add up quickly. But say we had to choose things that are not poetry or humanities in general? What would we need to squirrel away? I immediately think of more technical, practical volumes to remind us of how to do things that we now take for granted:

• Mathematics texts
• Physics texts
• Manuals for horticulture and animal husbandry
• Manuals for building structures and roads
• Books for identifying plants
• Medical texts

I’m sure I’m missing something. There are also several categories of things we could utterly do without. That’ll have to wait for another entry in Library Fun For The Summer!