Another subject area where mini collections can help you achieve some sense of completion is History. Like Food & Drink, History is an especially good subject upon which to build a private library. Not only have there been tens of thousands of titles published over the centuries, but many of these titles can be purchased quite inexpensively at yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the library sales, publishers' clearance sales and so on. This is especially true if you are building your private library out of paperbacks, book club editions and the like (as also is the case with, e.g., cookbooks):
As with Food & Drink, the first few levels below the main level probably have seen so many titles published that they can be stand-alone collections in their own right. For example:
- History > Ancient History > History of the Ancient Near East
- History > Early Modern History > Early Modern History of Western Europe
- History > History of China > Dynastic Histories of China
As was the case with Food & Drink, the key is to keep refining your focus until you reach a level where time and finances make achieving a sense of completion most likely. In the above cases, for instance, further refinement might look like this:
- History > Ancient History > History of the Ancient Near East > Early Bronze Age History of the Ancient Near East > History of Elam
- History > Early Modern History > Early Modern History of Western Europe > Renaissance in Western Europe > Renaissance in Italy
- History > History of China > Dynastic Histories of China > Pre-Unification Dynastic Histories of China > History of the Shang Dynasty
The above refinements can, of course, be taken even further, as we shall see tomorrow....
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