Do you need a home library?

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Do you need a home library? How many books do you, your family need? What to do with books that are clearly superfluous? How much should you spend on books?

At first glance, the answers are clear. The more books you have at home, the better. Therefore, you can spare money for anything, just not for spiritual food, not for books. Home library educates, teaches, can entertain, calm down, make you think about something. It was found that there is a direct relationship between interest in reading and the number of volumes in the house. Of those who have over a hundred volumes in their library, 92 percent regularly read fiction, and in addition, they borrow books from the library, from friends and acquaintances. And in those families where there are few books - a dozen or two, reading no more than 37 percent, and then they are engaged in reading from time to time. So the book in the house is a kind of catalyst for the cultural development of a person.

Collecting a home library is a purely personal matter. By the set of books, one can judge the tastes, character of a person, his profession, affection, hobbies. Well, what can you say about the character and hobbies of the owner of a library of several thousand volumes, most of which are so-called running ones. And unread ones. And such book lovers are quite common. Obtaining more and more new books becomes the meaning of life. For this, a person spares no time or money. It would seem commendable. Well, what if a person still does not get his hands on the main thing - reading, if books settle as an unread dead weight in the apartment? Is it worth it to lavish words of praise in this case? Unlikely. You can only feel sorry for such people. This bookomania is akin to alcoholism, when a person is unable to stop, to look at his situation critically.

Are there quantitative limits for a personal library? How many volumes do you need at home? One hundred? Two hundred? A thousand? Five thousand? Just as it is impossible to eat food beyond a certain limit, so the number of books that you are able to read in your life is also not infinite. Knowing the speed of reading, a person can estimate how much literature he can overcome in his life. On average, about five and a half thousand volumes. This is maximum.

Do you need a home library? Therefore, it is pointless to have books in excess of this amount in your personal library. But we must also take into account that each of us has to work through a lot of literature while studying. And how many newspapers, magazines, documents we read! And how many books we take from the library, from friends! As a result, it turns out that at home you need not have very many books, no more than a thousand. Well, if you leave only your loved ones, many of which you re-read several times, then even less.

Take a look at the volumes lined up on the shelves. The works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, Sholokhov are by no means needed for the interior. There is clarity with the books on the specialty - you open one or another of them almost every day. Poems - well, who will voluntarily part with them? There are many books that I have already read, but I want to return to them from time to time, leaf through them. An emergency reserve is children's publications.

But look, do you have any books that you and other family members have only opened once or twice and put back on the shelf? Calculate your book ballast. What to do with it? You can, of course, turn it over to second-hand books. But it’s better to do it differently: donate books. Perhaps what is not interesting to you will be of interest to your friends and acquaintances. Such a gift is almost always desirable.

Although we are talking about the home library, we are also talking about the family budget. How much of it should be devoted to books? Taking into account our previous calculations, we can safely say that the family hardly needs more than five hundred art books.(Naturally, this does not mean specialists, scientists, writers, for whom, perhaps, ten thousand volumes are not enough.)

So you need to proceed from this amount. When you see a new book on the counter, which everyone grabs indiscriminately, you still ask yourself: will you have time to read it? Will it sink unnecessarily on the bookshelf?

In one case, do not hesitate for a long time: if you come across a children's book. Here the advice is clear: buy. Such a purchase will pay off many times over.

The whole family you can play this game. You take off in a rocket to Mars. On a long journey, you can take only ten volumes with you. What kind? Choosing this “golden ten” will help you, your children, determine the true value of the book. It is unlikely that detective stories will be included in the "space" set, but Pushkin, L. Tolstoy, Chekhov will certainly.

"A house in which there are no books is like a body devoid of a soul," said Mark Thulius Cicero. There is almost nothing to add to these words. A home library is a great blessing if it serves a person. And if she is going for the sake of prestige, for the sake of beautiful bindings, then she emanates misery. Spiritual squalor.

A home library, even of a mind-boggling size, is not capable of filling its owners with spirituality and intellect. Only the work of the soul over the printed word can justify the funds spent on books.