Seeing Book Shelves on Virtual Calls


I have a confession... for me, the best part of virtual calls, or seeing any reporter or commentator working for home, is being able to check out their book shelves. I never use computer video, because I want to preserve the world's bandwidth. That means I don't share what my book shelves look like when I'm on a company call. Therefore, I thought I'd share my book shelves with the world.

My big categories of books are martial arts, mixed/miscellaneous, cybersecurity and intelligence, and military and Civil War history. I've cataloged about 400 print books and almost 500 digital titles. Over the years I've leaned towards buying Kindle editions of any book that is mostly print, in order to reduce my footprint.

For the last many years, my book shelving has consisted of three units, each with five shelves. Looking at the topic distribution, as of 2020 I have roughly 6 shelves for martial arts, 4 for mixed/miscellaneous, 3 for cybersecurity and intelligence, and 2 for military and Civil War history.

This is interesting to me because I can compare my mix from five years ago, when I did an interview for the now defunct Warcouncil Warbooks project.


In that image from 2015, I can see 2 shelves for martial arts, 4 for mixed/miscellaneous, 7 for cybersecurity and intelligence, and 2 for military and Civil War history.

What happened to all of the cybersecurity and intelligence books? I donated a bunch of them, and the rest I'm selling on Amazon, along with books (in new or like new condition) that my kids decided they didn't want anymore.

I've probably donated hundreds, possibly approaching a thousand, cyber security and IT books over the years. These were mostly books sent by publishers, although some were those that I bought and no longer needed. Some readers from northern Virginia might remember me showing up at ISSA or NoVASec meetings with a boxes of books that I would leave on tables. I would say "I don't want to come home with any of these. Please be responsible. And guess what -- everyone was!

If anyone would like to share their book shelves, the best place would be as a reply to my Tweet on this post. I look forward to seeing your book shelves, fellow bibliophiles.

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