I was rearranging my books and making/installing a new shelf for them in my office at work, the ones that I keep there anyway, and it got me thinking about why I decided to acquire the books that I did for my Ukrainian banknote collection. The rhyme and reason behind my acquisitions of these tomes has swung wildly from start to present, I say present because I'm not done building my library and currently have two more references on the way after winning two auctions last night.  In the beginning my purchases were of the very general type, The SCWPM (modern issues), Banknote Book and The Catalog of Paper Money of Ukraine to name a few of the firsts and since I was really only focusing on the modern issues I didn't purchase any references that included notes prior to 1991. As my collection has expanded so to has my library, which now includes such references as Museum exhibit catalogs, biographies of artists, newspapers and out of print references dating back to 1953. Not to mention my multitudes of articles, images and documents I've accumulated from online sources and stored away like literary nuts for winter. (HA! literary nuts.)

Newest books on the way, both are from the early 70's.

Another thing that has struck me is how one book/reference has led to another, for example. I was reading an article in The Ukrainian Weekly which mentioned a museum exhibition that led me to purchasing the exhibition catalog Full Circle - Ukraine's Struggle for Independence 100 years ago, this in turn leads me to purchasing In Metal, On Paper and Narbut which was quickly followed by Money on Paper and finally the chain was broken when I picked up this note, just because I fell in love with the design when I saw it in Money on Paper. 

I now realize that most if not all of my book purchases are connected in some similar manner. I would say a third of my Ukrainian reference books are in languages I can't read without my phone translator or hours spent typing out sentences in a Word document and then copy and pasting to an internet translator when the phone translation is not making complete sense but each book has proven invaluable to me in my collecting endeavors.

It's funny, your library grows as your collection grows and that's just the way of the world but it really hadn't dawned on me until I had to find a place to put all these dang books.  No matter how many times I heard or read someone say it, I just never thought it would happen to me.  

Let's see everyone's libraries, here's what I have going on at work!

I'm working on getting rid of that stupid cable, just need to pick up an extension and it's gone.