Show Us Your (Music Book) Library

[Mister Sharpe]

Here's my little music library; I call it that affectionately, but also in my mind's eye, accurately.  For my wife it looms extra large. (She is a devotee of minimalism).    I did the best I could to photograph it so you might see the titles therein.  I've room for a few more, you can see!  (I should add that this photo doesn't include the French and German titles, kept separately). Please do share your collection with us!   

[Mandryka]

About 4 shelves of this.

[Spotted Horses]

It would have been two, but I seem to have disposed of my copy of Grout.

[Kalevala]

Here's my little music library; I call it that affectionately, but also in my mind's eye, accurately.  For my wife it looms extra large. (She is a devotee of minimalism).    I did the best I could to photograph it so you might see the titles therein.  I've room for a few more, you can see!  (I should add that this photo doesn't include the French and German titles, kept separately). Please do share your collection with us!   

Can't see most of the titles.  I see Groves and perhaps a couple of music guides (Penguin's?).  Books 4&5 on the bottom look familiar.

Without counting shelves at the moment...downstairs I have a number of books on opera including composers and biographies or autobiographies on a number of singers...a smattering on opera houses and a couple on people like Walter Legge.  A few books on some other composers.  Upstairs: some more books mixed into cases containing CDs and LPs and a cabinet full of a number of old "Opera News" [= Met] magazines [Lots of fun to look at!].

K

[Kalevala]

I should add (and no, I'm not going to count them now!), @Tsaraslondon , the most books that I have on one singer is [and you all have already guessed this] Maria Callas.   

K

[Kalevala]

@Mister Sharpe Are the two books that I had mentioned (bottom shelf and fourth and fifth in from the left) ones on Wagner?

K

It would have been two, but I seem to have disposed of my copy of Grout.

What do you think of that book by Harnoncourt?

K

[Mister Sharpe]

@Mister Sharpe Are the two books that I had mentioned (bottom shelf and fourth and fifth in from the left) ones on Wagner?

Noooo, but thank you for playing! They are Vols. 1 and 2 of Milton Cross's New Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and Their Music (extensively revised and enlarged), a birthday present from my Mum in 1971. I was working on a paper about Kurt Weill then and she was disappointed those books had little to offer about that composer  .

[Kalevala]

Noooo, but thank you for playing! They are Vols. 1 and 2 of Milton Cross's New Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and Their Music (extensively revised and enlarged), a birthday present from my Mum in 1971. I was working on a paper about Kurt Weill then and she was disappointed those books had little to offer about that composer  .

LOL

K

p.s.  Boy, the program was given me grief tonight! :-(

[Florestan]

Biographies of Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Verdi and Ravel, a two-volume history of music, a dictionary of musicians and musical terms, two books by a late famous Romanian critic plus a book of Furtwaengler's selected writings, Romain Rolland's Beethoven, Berlioz's Memoirs, Stravinsky's Poetics of Music and Yehudi Menuhin's The Music of Man. All in Romanian (original or translation).

[Irons]

Only a couple of shelves of the usual suspects - Prokofiev, Bernstein Letters and Blue Note Records et al. Also defunct ICRC/Classical Record Collector magazines complete. My most valued tome cost me the least just £3, purchased in a second hand bookshop decades ago. A 1966 edition of The English Musical Renaissance by Frank Howes. Some criticism and views from Howes are outdated with passage of time, how can they not be. However, he is a font of knowledge on the subject and the book I dip into the most.

[Roasted Swan]

Only a couple of shelves of the usual suspects - Prokofiev, Bernstein Letters and Blue Note Records et al. Also defunct ICRC/Classical Record Collector magazines complete. My most valued tome cost me the least just £3, purchased in a second hand bookshop decades ago. A 1966 edition of The English Musical Renaissance by Frank Howes. Some criticism and views from Howes are outdated with passage of time, how can they not be. However, he is a font of knowledge on the subject and the book I dip into the most.

This book opened up vistas of composers and their music about which I knew nothing back when I bought my copy.  I find it quite poignant seeing "contemporary" pictures of Rubbra, Walton, Bliss are now historical images of lives long past...

[Kalevala]

One book that I didn't mention earlier--which I've had fun dipping into in the past--is Herman Klein and the Gramophone.

K