A home library should have both breadth (books on a wide variety of topics) and depth (lots of books on a single topic).
Whatever topic piques my children’s curiosity, there is likely to be at least one book they can pull right off the shelf. As they develop passions for certain subjects, we try to acquire a variety of books on those topics. We have pretty substantial collections of books about whales and dolphins, trains, J. R. R. Tolkien, the solar system, World Wars I and II, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, inventions, architecture, drawing, math, and animals.
My personal collections include ABC books, multiple editions of A Child’s Garden of Verses, books written or illustrated by Tasha Tudor, books about homeschooling, classic literature, books about writing, books about editing, and books about bibliophilia! I also collect the works of Eudora Welty, C. S. Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jan Karon, Jane Austen, Elisabeth Elliot, and Edith Shaeffer. (At one point I figured if I ever had a girl, I’d need to name her Elisabeth Edith Eudora…but I ended up with four boys.)
What are your favorite collections?
Mary Jo
What I collect? I blush to use the term…scrounge is more to the point, since collecting might imply that I am more knowledgeable than I am about things such as editions and conditions.
I have brought home several copies of Pilgrim’s Progress, mostly from the 1920’s and ’30’s–all different, all interesting. I have quite a few books by or illustrated by Edward Ardizzone–including Pilgrim’s Progress! I like the series of Oxford childrens’ classical retellings from the 1960’s, like N.B. Taylor’s The Aeneid of Virgil. And I seem to be acquiring more books by the literary critic Northrop Frye.