How This Library Came to Be

By the time I came of age, I was a certified bibliophile. I thought books the greatest creation ever and had a boundless appetite for them. This crazy passion, stemming mostly from another monomaniacal desire—to be a book writer—meant steady acquisition. I left a lot of books in Maryland after graduate school, some of them smelly with dampness. When I came back to Colorado in 1983, I began to rebuild, though most of the books I used back in the 1980s are no longer with me. As a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs in the 1990s, I received a ton of books; then, in the 2000s, I had a distinguished professorship with a research stipend, for which there was no better use than . . . more books. For many years, I loaned students fifty to a hundred titles every year and was always on the lookout for books whose contrapuntal opposition would make for a good paper. Here’s a controversy, I would tell them: resolve it.

I have lived in a three-story Victorian house since 1990, with ample space for bookshelves. The physical limits that restrain most book hounds were therefore not so onerous for me, though eventually, at some 4,000 volumes, I reached the point where there was no room for anything more. I would have to start throwing things out. I parted with scads of books when I retired from Colorado College in 2020, as there was no room for them at home. With the help of my daughter and her boyfriend, I had managed to organize the home library a bit in the early 2010s, but after much use and further acquisition, it grew totally out of control. The library became so large that I couldn’t find books I really, really wanted to see. They had vanished!

In the course of preparing bibliographical materials for the two books I published in 2026, I conducted vain searches for lost volumes. My office descended into a total mess, with books stacked under desks, against the walls, and on the floor. Unlike most people, I can go for long periods oblivious to dishevelment, with my desk and immediate surroundings resembling a crime scene after a careless burglar has ransacked it. But not being able to find the books I was looking for was a first-class bummer. Happily, I could find most of the materials I needed online, though I was often a bereft and frustrated loser when searching for them at home.

After my two books were finished, in the summer of 2026, I decided to take pictures of the shelves and, with the help of my son and ChatGPT, make a catalog. Doing last what I should have done first caused some regret, but turned out to be enjoyable and useful. Identifying the volumes through ChatGPT proved a challenge and produced some hallucinations. The Chatman came through like a champ on many things, but reading book spines isn’t top of the list; it still requires supervision. Checking its work has taken me through many shelves, one by one, though there’s more work to do. The experience was fun: books have a tactile feel and a certain look that is intrinsically satisfying. Opening them, remembering them, flipping through them, hugging them, is a lot different from just gawking at them on a bookshelf. And gawking itself becomes onerous, as many of my shelves are squirrelled away in corners. The price of looking is a crick in your neck or a bent knee, as though you had to prostrate yourself before God to find that title.

That crick-in-the-neck problem was, for me, of long standing. As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University some fifty years ago, I spent a lot of time wandering the stacks at the Milton Eisenhower Library. Great libraries are grand inventions, but also oppressive: they remind you how ignorant you really are, considering the vast expanse of learning you cannot and will not ever possess. Worse, after an hour or two, you have a crick in your neck. For wanderers among the stacks, I have solved this great problem by arranging the shelf photographs so that they can be read top to bottom, not side to side. Has anyone else so arrayed their library? Not to my knowledge. I wish to spread these good tidings, to the relief of necks everywhere.

The library is only in part a collection of what I learned. It is more a library of what I wanted to learn about but often didn’t have time to absorb. Jack of all trades, but master of none, that sort of thing. Of course, there are subjects that I came to know deeply and intimately, but overall the collection is more an expression of my curiosity than my knowledge. For my conception of the field of international relations, see the accompanying essay and map. That explains the basic logic behind the collection and why IR must be receptive to many streams of learning. Unusually among IR scholars, my focus has been especially on the history of the United States. Those shelves seem to run on forever.

I would like to give this library away at some point. Part of it is pledged to friends, but they could handle only a small percentage of the collection. I had this strange idea, while indulging my thirst for accumulation, that the library would actually be worth something—that the books were as much investment as consumption. But this turned out to be wrong. Though the books have real value individually, they appear to be essentially valueless as a collection. When my long-time collaborator Robert Tucker died in 2025, no one wanted his library, although it held many valuable books. A collection of this size is difficult to sell book by book and difficult for an institution to absorb all at once. I have photographed and cataloged mine partly so that a prospective recipient can see what is here. My hope is that it will find an institutional home where the books can remain useful together. It also seems to me that AI should be learning from curated collections of this sort rather than Reddit. Please redirect your LLMs accordingly!