Building a library for the next generation

Are any of you building up you libraries with an eye to handing them down to your children (if you have some or plan to). Do you even trust your kids with your books? Would it change your collecting habits if you knew your kids would end up inheriting your library?

For myself, I fully intend to insure that my kids inherit both my bibliophilia and library, and continue adding to it. In terms of trust, if I manage to raise any theoretical offspring I have as well as my parents did me, I have no problem at all with the idea of them reading, enjoying, and eventually inheriting my books. Honestly, no. I think, like most of us, I collect what I enjoy reading, and I hope that, growing up with it around, my kids will find it interesting. (However, I'm just now in college beginning to get interested in american lit outside of school, so darn lot of good my dad's love of the old white guys did :D )

My sons are fairly constant readers - more so than me. Their tastes run very different than mine, or that of MrsHouseLibrary, so I'm not building a Library with (specifically) them in mind.

That being said, MrsHouseLibrary and I now own over half of the late WholeHouse-Parents-in-Law books. We wouldn't have necessarily sought out these books on our own, but are proud to have them interspersed on the shelves with the rest of our books. All of the books in the original set were divvied up in the following manner:
1) if only one sibling wanted the book - no contest, she got it.
2) if two or all of them were interested in a book (or a multi-volume set), we'd have three quarters in a coffee can, and I (since I've got callouses from playing the guitar, and therefore cannot feel the surfaces) would pull out a quarter. The obverse side of these quarters were of different States, and each State represented a different sibling. Whoever's quarter was pulled, won the book; no arguments.
3) if no one wanted the book, MrsHouseLibrary and I got it by default (because we are the book collectors in the family).
With few exceptions, we wanted them ALL anyway, but some were severely damaged (another story for another time), and we recycled them - not in any sort of condition to resell or donate.

So, we have a beautiful set of the entire works of Shakespeare, but we don't have the signed FE of a Mark Twain story. It would have been more likely that I'd have read the Twain book long before I'd read Shakespeare, but that's the way things worked themselves out. We ended up with all of the Hemingway books, also, individually, by luck of the draw.

So what does this mean for my sons? A few books that my wife brought into the marriage will go to her son, who doesn't read at all. The rest (just shy of 2,000, and nearing a ton and a half) will be divvied up among my sons in much the same manner as I described above.
One son has taken to collecting and reading Classics; another is partial towards Arthurian legends and Medieval studies; another is more eclectic than the other two, so it should be interesting. Fortunately, for them, all of the books are cataloged and arranged according to Dewey, so finding what they might want shouldn't be too difficult for them.

In college, when I moved out of the house, I took my father's entire golden age sci-fi collection with me and most of my mother's non-fiction science tomes because I knew neither would notice they were missing. I was/(am?) of the opinion that the family books should live with the one who loves them most. In fact, just the other day, 10 years from when I, uh, 'borrowed' them, my father said to me, "Hey did you ever read _____? I used to have that book - I wonder whatever happened to it..." He was quite surprised, and happy, to hear that I indeed read it, and knew exactly which shelf it was on. Since then I have also absorbed my boyfriend's vast fantasy collection into my own.

As for the next generation? I'm 29, and I have a 13 year old sister who has finally, within the past year and a half, discovered the joys of reading and is beginning to build her own library. We already loan a lot of books to each other because I still enjoy reading YA books on occasion, and I am confident that as she gets older she will branch out into the other genres she can find on my bookshelves. Nothing would bring me more joy, I think, than to find out that she has abducted a book from my shelf because she loved it too much to let it go.

So, in short, yes, I find that I consider my little sister's tastes when choosing some of the books for my library in anticipation of a mass 'liberation' of my books when she grows up and eventually gets her own place.

Leaving my library to my kids would be great. In fact, they're the reason I have a library. When they were babies, I realized that we didn't have any literature in our home. I started buying books to ensure they would always have at least the classics to read at any time. I still remember my daughter telling me she needed to buy "Animal Farm" for a class assignment. From our library shelf, I pulled a beautifully illustrated copy (it happened to be in a slipcase) and handed it over with a feeling of accomplishment. Books are for reading, and the thought of such an edition in her backpack fit my plan completely. Imagine the disappointment when she asked if she could just go to Barnes & Noble for the cheap paperback that everyone else would have.

For now, neither of my kids are the slightest bit interested. Someday....maybe.

DeusExLibrus - "I fully intend to insure that my kids inherit both my bibliophilia and library" --The former, but not necessarily the latter, seems to me a very difficult task!

Here is a list of things that have so far made bibliophilia irresistible and gratifying to me, and some of these reasons, if not all, will hopefully be enough to instill a love of books for future generations:

- The well-crafted book. Typography, printing, bookbinding--the quality of each of these things leaves an impression on me of how much the author, and the craftsmen who have a hand in constructing the book, care about the contents. It could just be my naivete, but I think that once you start to understand what constitutes good quality craftsmanship in a book, you find that great examples of craftsmanship are rarely done insincerely or are falsely representative of the quality of the contents. I believe that books of any value to you should be life-long companions and therefore built to last. One definition of a great or classic book is that it is infinitely re-readable and always insightful. If you want the books to last several generations, it is especially important that the books are not of disposable quality.

- The joys of bargain book-hunting. I fully believe that on any budget it is possible to collect a substantial library consisting only of hardcover books that would otherwise be paperback. Nevertheless, when you find books that you treasure, I also believe that no money should be spared in finding the best edition you can find of that book, so long as you are willing to handle, mark up, and read that copy. The quality of the printing and typography takes precedence over the binding, because the binding is easier to replace.

- Browsing libraries and used bookstores. Regarding private libraries I think it is important to see how much people have valued their books throughout history, and that can be seen reflected in the books and the art and architecture of the libraries that house them. Browsing college libraries and used bookstores is the best way that I know of for discovering what books have been published throughout history, and expanding the horizons for what books you desire for your own library.

- Reducing time spent on video games and television, etc. Having grown up on a healthy dose of both and becoming addicted heavily to video games, bibliophilia was a wonderful remedy. I wonder, though, if raising children on books will later cause them to rebel and stick to television and video games for the rest of their lives. I would say that the more a budding bibliophile can discover on their own the joys and pleasures of books, the better.

- Bookshelves. It is amazing to me how I can completely forget about a book that I purchased with great interest if it is not clearly displayed and easily accessible on a bookshelf. That is why I am horrified by libraries that only allow you to request pre-determined books without being able to browse in the stacks for books that you didn't know existed in the first place. This is all to say that a home library should be as accessible and as central to the home as television stands currently are--the location of giant flatscreen televisions is unfailingly the best place for a wall of bookshelves :)

I'm not intentional about collecting for his future- but at 15, our son is clearly a book collector already. He recently dscovered vintage science fiction, so I need ot get into the boxes in the attic- but I did find some good stuff at used book store for him for christmas- curently being read by me at lunch hour at work, since they are ones I haven't read. On the other hand, my husband, a serious book collector on a few topics (polar exploration, early geology) is beginning to donate duplicates for fundraiser auctions, and otherwise reducing volume of stuff that only he cares about.

I do have some of my parent's books, but not all.

I thought I'd comment on this since I recently had the opportunity to take some books from my grandparents' collection after they died. My parents took me to their house and let me take whatever books I wanted, but out of about probably 300 books, I was only interested enough in maybe 5 (and not because I already had duplicates in my collection of then ~1300 books). Perhaps my tastes are just too specific and don't match theirs. I can't imagine that I would want a ton of my parents' collection either.

My mom doesn't want to just give them away or dump them. I tried to convince her to either (1) try donating them to a library (which can presumably put them in a sale if they don't want them for their collection), (2) sell them to a used-book store, or (3) sell them online herself, with the reasoning that book sales, used-book stores, and online stores were how I had amassed a lot of my collection, and that these methods, especially selling them online, would find them a new home where they could be cherished, but I don't think my mom was convinced. Or perhaps she was intimidated by the effort of selling them online.

I won't be having kids, so I don't know where my books will be going when I go (hopefully not for a while). Maybe they could go to the living person who's highest on the weighted ranking of my "members with your books" listing? ;-)

Both of my children borrow freely from my shelves. We share many of the same passions. LT tagging helps me to keep tabs on some of these volumes. I've begun a soft weeding, determining that the woodworking books will be more beneficial on one daughter's shelves because she and her boyfriend are renovating a house and building furniture now. Childrens picture books and beginning chapter books are better off at the home with grandchildren. Not that I can part with many of my favorites! I love illustration too well.

I hope my kids will want my books some day. They both like books now but they're only 4 and 2 years old so we'll see how it holds out over the long term. Growing up now though, I won't be surprised if they eventually come to regard physical books as silly antiques. I'll just have to hope that enough of my packrat genes got through to make them get that warm fuzzy feeling at the idea of possessing a well-loved book.

Unfortunately, I have no children who would inherit my books. I'm not sure if my nephews would be interested or not. I just hope they go to someone who would appreciate them.

When you think about it, we're all just temporary guardians to our books. When was the last time you ever heard of someone throwing away a book? They all get bequeathed, or sold, or given away, or donated. Books end up with someone who wants them.

Books get thrown away all the time. I've thrown a few away myself.

I have no kids on the horizon, however I have made arrangements in my will for my books, music, postcards and other collections. A few friends and relatives get first crack. After that, four community libraries, two historical societies, my high school and one academic library are to receive lists to see if they have any interest. ANything unclaimed is to be offered to AAUW. I've been maintaining a comprehensive as well as targeted lists of my collections for quite sometime. For example, I have a good bit of local history items from both where I grew up and where I now live. Books, postcards, advertising, local memorabilia, etc. The items pertaining to back home probably won't be of interest to the local libraries where I currently live, etc.

One of these days, I'll get around to adding my complete inventory to LibraryThing. I've been only adding newly acquired books to LT.

The confusion of handing down books has already hit my library hard, although I'm far from dead. I have three kids, now all young adults. When they reached their teens, I was somewhat surprised to find that I had been able to pass my bibliophilia along to the next generation to the point that, in order to avoid losing some of my favourite books or having them become the focus of family quarrels, I had to buy an extra three copies of Beowulf, Njal's Saga, Xenophon, and Homer.

Not to mention a lot of Heinlein and Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and various YA fiction. Then one of them started to collect various editions of Tolkien (8 or 10 copies of 3-volume LotR plus everything else take up a lot of room) and then two of them moved out, but one moves frequently and lives barely above the poverty line, so many of the books live here (and during a season of near-homelessness - by "near" homeless I mean moving from sofa to sofa, not on the street - more books were shipped back), and one is 7000 miles away and it has been hard to transport books within the airline luggage allowances ... even with LT, I can scarcely keep track of what's here, there, and the other place.

That being said, I doubt they'll want all my books. I do expect the Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett to be warmly contested.