Faq’s
… under construction …
Historiek
The Occam’s Razor Library was founded in 1995, or so its librarian wills you to believe. Actually, at that time, there was no amount of books, worthy of being labeled ‘a library’, let alone to fill a bookcase. There were some Belgian and Dutch second-rate authors, one Kruithof, a Freud, a Bukowski and a few dictionaries. It’s not that no (other) books were being read at that time, but buying them simply seemed to be a tremendous waste of money, especially since one’s social life came with obligations too.
Even when the year turned into 1996, the word ‘library’ was still too big a word to apply – though if memory serves me well, a few Freuds had been added, and maybe a Kerouac had been lifted from the parental shelves.
By the middle of 1996 however, things started to shift. Our parents granted us use of a number of their books, – a large bunk of old detectives, the likes of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen came our way, – and also, we succesfully pleaded with some of them to store some of their books, with us. And thus came to be that we suddenly had not a dozen books, but almost 200.
Also we discovered the greatness of the Russians, and of Lawrence, Miller, Hamsun… And felt we should honor that greatness by buying at least some of their books. And ‘some’ soon became ‘as many as possible’.
When halfway through 1997 our studies didn’t exactly take flight, and we began to realize a nobelprize winning academic career wasn’t what providence had in store for us, we continued to look for greatness elsewhere. In an act of rebellion against the oversimplification (or so we felt it) of the psychological sciences in their understanding of Man, we named the pile of books, consisting of no more than 5 or 6 shelves at that time, ‘The Occam’s Razor Library’.
It wasn’t until the year 1999 however that The Library took a pathological turn. Realizing at last that, far from a doctoral seat, changing bedpans wasn’t what we wanted to do with our lives – as well as flunking big time on the algebra – we dropped out of university and put all our effort in obtaining as many books as we could. Being unemployed at that time, money was scarce and The Library took up a large portion of our overall budget, limiting in its turn the money we were able to spend on food and clothes.
Before long we had 600 books, then 700, 800 … Little else did we do but read, buy books, drink and read while hangovered. From morn till dawn, and back again. We filled an entire wall with bookshelves. And when that wasn’t enough, we bought an extra bookcase and placed it on the opposite wall.
Realizing this was a thing that wouldn’t go away over the next few years, we then enlisted to become a librarian – to be able to fill our days, for the rest of our lives among books. (‘t Freaked us out, btw, that most real-life librarians have no special love concerning books. It was like taking classes in Psychology all over again…) We graduated, top of our class, got a job as a librarian, and now earn our (minimum)wage classifying books that aren’t ours, advising (often worthless) books to thousands of strangers. In the evening we come home, unpack the books we’ve bought during our lunchbreak, or whatever package the postman dropped off, and classify them on our own shelves…
We also bought a little bookcase for the books of our newborn son. So that the legacy may continue …
