The books I keep close at hand

My office is in the process of moving from one downtown DC building to another.  This means a lot of things, not all of them good, and one of them is the physical act of moving.  When we show up at our new location next week, all my office belongings will be in boxes and crates, except for the items I choose to move myself.

This has caused me to consider what are my high-priority items, those that can fit in one box I will carry with me to the new location, so I can place them at hand right away and start work before going through the arduous task of unpacking the rest.  Some of these items are books, and this is the list.  I keep these not in my bookcase but on my desk, within easy reach from my computer:

• Green Community (eds. Susan Piedmont-Palladino and Tim Mennell, with a chapter by yours truly)
• Growing Cooler (Reid Ewing et al.)
• LEED 2009 for Neighborhood Development (CNU, NRDC, & USGBC)
• Once There Were Greenfields (Benfield, Raimi & Chen)
• Original Green (Steve Mouzon)
• Our Built and Natural Environments (EPA)
• Roget’s Thesaurus
• Smart Growth In a Changing World (ed. Jonathan Barnett, including a lengthy chapter by me)
• The Smart Growth Manual (Duany, Speck & Lydon)
• Solving Sprawl (Benfield, Terris & Vorsanger)
• Urban Green (Peter Harnik)

I would also have grabbed the most recent issues of the Journal of the American Planning Association, Planning, Urban Land, and New Urban News, but my colleague Marissa already packed them before I could claim them.

There you have it.  There are many others in the bookcase, and of course hundreds on the hard drive of my computer, some every bit as essential to have close at hand (Ewing & Cervero's great article "Travel and the Built Environment," for example).  But these are the ones in hard copy that I’m not trusting someone else to move.

Move your cursor over the images for credit information.