Books and snow!

[bironic]

The plan today was to take my father to the Museum of Natural History for his birthday, which was yesterday, but we decided instead to traverse the county visiting tag sales, starting with one house he'd seen yesterday that was chockablock with books. There must have been thousands of them packed on shelves in every room, almost entirely nonfiction, most of them in pristine condition if dusty. The man they belonged to was or is a doctor and seemed to have especial interests in medicine (obviously), the Bible, Egyptology, World War Two, Arthurian legend, the ancient philosophers, astrology and Nostradamus, among other things. I don't know how many of them he actually read; there were multiple copies of several books.

But what a treasure trove! I found books I've wanted to own for years and some I decided to look for just this week, like Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action, which we read in high school, and physiology and pathology textbooks (*coughdork*); Budge's complete translation of the Book of the Dead, which our university library didn't stock; books about the facts behind three of the movies you've heard about this week (a two-volume set about the Battle of Stalingrad, one about the U-Boat war and one about the final days in Hitler's bunker); Escape from Sobibor, which was made into a movie with Rutger Hauer and possibly Matthew Broderick; several biographies of my favorite pharaoh, Akhenaten, and a few references on Egyptian theology and social life, which are interesting in themselves as well as for research on a story set in a similar culture; and the last remaining Shakespeare play I can't believe I haven't read, King Lear. It's all so wonderfully stimulating, especially following a mini-discussion on catilinarian's blog on the limitations of time and non-vocational interests.

Misc.

• Language in Thought and Action - S. I. Hayakawa
• The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
• The Knightly Tales of Sir Gawain - Trans. Louis B. Hall
• Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
• Alberto Giacometti - Guggenheim Museum
• King Lear - Shakespeare

Medical

• Textbook of Physiology, 16th ed. - Fulton
• Anderson's Pathology (Sixth Ed.), vols 1 & 2

WWII/Holocaust

• The Berlin Bunker - James P. O'Donnell
• Treblinka - Jean-Francois Steiner
• D Day - David Howarth
• U333 - Peter Cremer
• Escape from Sobibor - Richard Rashke
• The Reich Marshal: A Biography of Hermann Goering - Leonard Mosley
• The Avengers - Michael Bar-Zohar
• Moscow to Stalingrad: Decision in the East & Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the West - Ziemke & Bauer

Egyptology

• The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt - Ed. Ian Shaw
• Conversations with Mummies - Rosalie David & Rick Archbold
• The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt - Richard H. Wilkinson
• The Hidden Tombs of Memphis - Geoffrey T. Martin
• A Guide to the Tombs and Temples of Ancient Luxor: Thebes in Egypt - Nigel & Helen Strudwick
• The Gods of the Egyptians, vols 1 & 2 - E. A. Wallis Budge
• Legends of the Egyptian Gods: Hieroglyphic Texts and Translations - Budge
• A Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses - George Hart
• Egyptian Myths - Hart
• Osiris & The Egyptian Resurrection, vols 1 & 2 - Budge
• Ancient Egyptian Literature, vols 1 & 2 - Miriam Lichtheim
• The Book of the Dead - Budge
• How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs - Mark Collier & Bill Manley
• Ancient Egyptian Medicine - John F. Nunn
• The Role of Women in the Ancient Egyptian Society - Abdel Halim NUR EL DIN
• Akhenaten: King of Egypt - Cyril Aldred
• Akhenaten: The Heretic King - Donald B. Redford
• The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt - Arthur Weigall
• Tutankhamen: Life and Death of a Pharaoh - Christiane Desroches
• The Complete Tutankhamun - Nicholas Reeves
• Chronicle of a Pharaoh: The Intimate Life of Amenhotep III - Joann Fletcher

42 volumes in all, and believe it or not, I was selective. Also, despite what some of the titles may suggest, so far as I can tell every one of these is solid scholarship; I tossed back the melodramas, the bestsellers, the hack work, the historical fiction. Half the Egyptology books are gorgeous hardcovers with full-color glossy illustrations -- nicer than some of the textbooks we used in Archaeology class at school -- and some are standard texts by some of the biggest names in the field. It looks as if nothing but the WWII paperbacks have been read.

I figure the total value of the lot, going by original sale prices where listed (D Day was fifty cents, one of the Egypt histories £25) and with very conservative estimates on the rest, is about $800-900. And I got everything, plus a three-videotape set of Stephen Hawking's Universe and an Eddy Duchin CD, for $50, which, had I tried, I could probably have argued down to $40. *shakes head in dazed amazement* I have no space and no time, but that doesn't matter.

All of which brings to mind two questions:

1. Why do we (because I suspect some of you may share this problem) continue to purchase books when we lack shelf space and haven't even read what we have?
2. How did it happen that two of my greatest historical interests are in times when people of the faith in which I was raised were persecuted?

The snow is here! I'm off to start poking through everything.

Comments

[bironic.livejournal.com]

1a. It is a collection, but doesn't it seem that collecting books is... well, better than collecting antiques? Because you don't just have material (paper, etc.), you have knowledge and stories.

1b. Hm, I've never counted my books. They're on about 13 shelves and in 2 cabinets and a few random stacks, plus boxes in the basement for stuff I read in pre-teens (Star Trek paperbacks, Baby-sitters Club, Nancy Drew), plus college texts which are mostly in the closet. We also have a few bookshelves in other rooms populated with non-booky things -- maps, rocks, crystal figurines. I think everything in here would have a home if there were one room designated as a library proper.

2. Haven't tried the neo-Nazi sites; mostly I frighten myself and others with half a shelf of books with large swastikas.

No, I haven't seen nor heard of Holocaust memorial books, but they sound amazing. Well-written Holocaust memoirs are like nothing else on Earth.