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Perfect happiness when I was 17 was a new Alan Garner and a bag of soft-centre chocolates in my coat pocket. Perfect happiness almost 40 years later is having enough money to buy the new Diane Wynne Jones in hard cover and the newest Kazuo Ishiguro (even if what I was looking for was The White Darkness) and then to come home and- not read them, in fact, but instead to dismantle the toppling stack of Gangans and ZeroSums and WARDs and put various episodes into files where I have them at need. All my Gaiden eps in order in the clear file book someone has finally thought of importing from Japan. Ah, such happiness.

Also to discover I *can't* dismantle ZeroSum because there are too many series that look too interesting. I shall build a wall with them instead.

ETA: to add to my happiness, sort of, this. The PO is a horse's tuchus, as ever, but the union makes us strong.

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Organising things into beautiful order can be such total pleasure.

*sighs* One basic requirement for book-acquiring is owning a house to build walls with.

but pamphlets, of course, deliver 'em! it should give a lot of people a few good laughs after a hard day's work?

Like a perfectly placed seal stamped on a document, yes. It also alleviates that modern horror trope, the feeling that objects are secretly taking over your space. 'I am master of all I survey and I can put my hand at once on whatever I need' instead of my usual 'It's here somewhere'- and probably covered in dust bunnies.

But that's why I bought a house: to keep the books in. It even has a garden. Wonder if there's a way of constructing garden sheds out of the papier mache a wall of ZeroSums would turn into in the TO climate?

I say nothing against other regions of Canada; I merely note that people on the West Coast tend to be a bit on the ahh 'earnest' side. Still, I'd probably refuse to deliver that crap myself if I was there. Hate literature is hate literature, after all.

So are you saying you take the phonebook magazines apart and only save the pages that are of interest to you?! Cool! I have all these Racish magazines I've been thinking about dumping ...

A trick I learned from living in a single room in Japan. One must dismantle or be driven out of house and home in very short order. And that's just the monthlies. God help people who get weekly mags.

It's kind of a judgment call. Some of the Saiyuuki eps, and the Gaiden certainly, I want in the nice large format page even when I have the tankoubon. Other series I want to be able to read a bunch of eps in one go to get an idea what it's like. There's always a chance something will get interesting all of a sudden, and at that point I'd kick myself if I'd thrown the back copies out. Hence ZS stays intact for a few months at least, and then I'll decide if that Edo-period magic thing or WK or Loveless is worth reading. Though I think the answer to the Loveless one, even without reading, is no.

Totally. Your kingdom extends all the way to your borders. The barbarian is thwarted at the moat.

The barbarian, to rephrase Auden who was, I believe, quoting someone else (ah google, how I love you: Joyce) will come in any case: but for today he is thwarted at the moat.

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