OSHO: Books I have Loved

[Eva Libre]

To me a book is not just a book, it is a love affair...

I have loved reading from my very childhood. My own personal library consisted of one hundred fifty thousand rare books of all the religions, philosophies, poetry, literature. And I have read all of them, but with no purpose; I enjoyed it.

 

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The OSHO Library is maintained by Osho International Foundation.

All of these books have been read, signed and dated by Osho, except about lO,OOO which have been gathered on his request after he stopped reading.

Osho's personal library is now housed in a building
named "Lao Tzu House" at the Osho Meditation
Resort in Pune, India. The library holds more than
150,000 volumes, mostly in the humanities, including
history, psychology, religion and philosophy. It also
features a quite substantial collection of the classic
literature of East and West, along with an impressive
array of biographies, books on physics and earth
sciences, etc. The library has been created with aesthetic
considerations in mind, the object being to create a
light and airy feeling rather than the "heavy" and
"serious" look of so many libraries. Books are sorted
according to size and color, and placed on the shelves
in an arrangement that suggests ocean waves. The
effect is organic and natural, with no solid blocks of
color or size to grab the eye and weigh it down.
Osho himself was an avid book collector and reader
throughout most of his life, and the library includes
volumes that he has kept in pristine condition since his
childhood. He liked to underline his books, and to
create an individualized painting on the front pages,
often including his signature, in place of a printed book
plate. Part of his work was to give daily extemporaneous
talks, which he would sometimes punctuate with
quotes and passages from books he had read. The
library was catalogued by hand for many years, with
cross-references that included not only title, author and
subject matter, but such things as the cover color,
number of pages and trim size. In that way, if Osho
wanted to see that "big book on Einstein's theory of
relativity with the blue cover, " the librarian could locate
the needle in the haystack with relative ease. In 1987,
a three-year project was initiated to computerize the
card catalog.

The UK library journal LOGOS has published an extensive article about the library written by:
Pierre Evald, Department of Library & Information Management Royal School of Library and Information Science Langagervej 4 - DK- 220 Aalborg Ø Room: 418 T: + 45 98 15 79 22 E-mail: [e-mail]