I have always dreamed of owning a library.
Floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, solid wood libraries, with ladders I would climb to reach the books on the high shelves...
But damn, I never fulfilled that dream.
Which is because I don't live in a spacious house (or a huge apartment), where I could turn one room into a library, but also because I would have a hard time filling all the shelves on that wall with the books I have in my collection.
But, maybe my book collection is not enough for a library, but it is quite enough to be presented in the March topic in #HiveCollectors
What's more, I think my collection here will be called huge again 🙂 
Due to the fact that I do not have a unique place to store books, they are located in several locations in the apartment.
In addition to the books that I have in the apartment, which I will present in this post, I have another part of the collection that is in my cottage, but which, for the purposes of this post, I will not get to.
And in the apartment I have books from my early youth (most of these editions are in the cottage).
My favorite are the Walt Disney ones.
We have had them since childhood and treated them with care, which is proven by their condition.
Both my younger brother and I, under the supervision of our parents, carefully flipped through their pages, taking care not to damage them, and it never occurred to us to draw or write on them.
At first, we just looked at the pictures and listened to the stories that our parents read from them, so that, after we learned to read, my brother and I would read them from the first page to the last.
Maybe it's the upbringing from my youth, that we treat books with respect, that we keep them and don't destroy them, which is why I now have such a large collection?
In addition to countless editions of "light" literature, various thrillers, dramas, some philosophical and wisdom books, I also have several sets.
The first two were bought for me by my mother and I read them towards the end of primary and secondary school.
The works of Branislav Nusic, which in later years I also saw as theater plays and enjoyed the performance of the actors, who, reading the books, I always imagined as the actors of a play or film.
The second set that I read from the first to the last book was Ivo Andric, the Nobel Prize-winning writer.
I may have read some of those books before the time, so I'm definitely thinking of remembering them in the coming years.
From the large set of Dostoyevsky, I read several works, the ones we had in the compulsory reading at school.
Sometimes I reach for one of them, but the style of Russian classics seems a little too difficult for me to read today, probably because I'm too tired, so I don't have the concentration to read too long descriptions (and slow time, like in Silent Don, when on several pages Mikhail Sholokhov describes how the main character mows a meadow, describes the course of a battle or a simple funeral).
Today, my attention is either a thriller, favorite writer Ju Nesbe, I mentioned him here several times, in whose works I followed the Norwegian detective Hari Hule, or some epic fantasy, such as this Game of Thrones series (which, unfortunately, has not been brought to an end).
Another interesting part of the collection is the editions that were collected together with the editions of some daily newspapers, when it was popular. Every week, for half a year, along with daily newspapers, customers received an edition of classic literature by various authors.
As in the case of Russian classics, some of these works are still waiting to be read.
They are within my reach, they form an essential part of the collection and they are waiting for their moment, that is, my moment when I have time to dedicate myself to them.
Until then, like the children's books from the beginning of the story, I keep them in a safe and dry place, dust them regularly and sometimes shake and air out their pages.
In addition to the books that I put on the shelf after reading and keep for a long time, I also have several books in my collection that I recommend and gladly lend to read.
One of them is Semper Idem, perhaps the best book by a local author that I have ever read. By the state of the pages, it can be concluded that the book has been read many times 🙂
And the other two, which are more like a guide for choosing the destinations I plan to visit, are: *501 cities you must visit * and 501 destinations you must visit.
Sometimes, when I get tired of reading, when my eyes get tired of the computer, I know to pick up these two books and by flipping through its pages, I remember some places I've been to before, imagine myself in some places I plan to visit and dream of some places I'll probably never get to.
Because by reading the books we have in
with our collections, and by imagining the landscapes that the writers write about in those books, we can teleport in our thoughts to every corner of our planet, to distant space or to some distant past.
With this post, I'm teleporting into the #HiveCollectors monthly topic and greeting all of you, Hive collectors ❤️