Books

1835 and counting… I’m close to half done entering the books into the library app I’m using. Both my DH and I are editing books from our personal collections, to get real with ourselves, make shelf space, and not afflict our children too terribly much down the road 😏. Though, that said, there will be 1000’s of books, just not 10’s of thousands!

This time (the 4th or 5th) I’m taking my time handling my parent’s volumes. I’m using the app to notate all books that my mom edited, and it’s a freaking delight when entering a book (by USBN # if I’m lucky) that the app shows up with her as the author of that book 💕!!! It’s interesting to dive into forensics with this part of the project. Some volumes list her boss as the ‘general editor,’ but her CV shows that she edited the book! It’s fun, and humbling, to see the breadth of her work, and I don’t think I own everything she edited. As of this writing there’re 68 individual titles she wrote or edited on a continuous line of shelves. I’ve only just gotten started on cross referencing her CV, and have a 3’ stack of books to review that are ‘ripe,’ meaning she probably edited most of them.

It’s challenging to make further cuts in my parent’s library. I’ve already gotten rid of 100’s. Mostly modern fiction, things we each have, and old travel guides. The next cut will be duplicates of things like “The Oxford Book of Modern Verse” and the like. I have a website, given to me by an old colleague of mom’s, where I can check the value of old books. What I’ve seen so far discourages me from going into the antique book biz. I’ll be glad to find the duplicate volumes intellectual ‘forever homes.’