Miles's blog

I just can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to get rid of all my books. I am not sure how many I have, I am doing an inventory now. There are hundreds. Of course, I can’t take them with me, so I really should find a way to dispose of most of them.

But I can’t. Some of these books I have been carting around for 40 years or more. I know a lot of those aren’t worth anything, but they mean something to me. I can remember sitting in a quiet house after my mom died reading science fiction. The escape of other worlds, times, and beings provided a way to avoid thinking about the situation I was in. I can’t just toss those old Heinleins and Asimovs into the nearest recycle bin, or hand them over for the next library book sale. Selling them is out of the question because these old paperbacks, by and large, are worth very little. I am not going to fork over my memories for a dollar a book.

Others are just too interesting. The Chronicle of the 20^th Century, for example, or Billboard’s Book of Number 1 Hits, from the first rock and roll number one—Rock Around the Clock— to April 13, 1985—We Are the World. (Of course they have updated the book since 1985, but since there is very little music since 1985 I care to listen to, I have never bought an updated edition.) The stories in here are fascinating. I mean, aren’t you curious how “Disco Duck” (Rick Dees and his cast of idiots) achieved number one status in October 1976? Or how Louis Armstrong broke the Beatles three-month run at the top of the charts in 1964? Well I am.

Some books are just too valuable to part with. As part of my inventory, I have been checking the prices on eBay. I have a paperback from 1972 that is selling for $33. Seriously. I think I found it on the floor in high school. I can’t just give it away now after lugging it around for 39 years. One of my old NFL annuals is actually listed on eBay for $150. That is a lot of money. I will save that for when the old PERA just won’t stretch far enough that month.

Many of these are books I bought over the years and have not yet read. I plan to someday. I just discovered I own a former library book about a 1912 football match between West Point and Carlisle Indian School. Of course the latter was captained by the immortal Jim Thorpe. The former was led by a guy known for other things, Dwight David Eisenhower. (And if you don’t know who that is most of my blogs will be incomprehensible.) I have no idea why that game is so memorable, but I plan to eventually find out. But that can’t happen if I send that book into the hands of some other curious knowledge-seeker.

Of course, I have a lot of best sellers. Books most of you have read like Seabiscuit and Band of Brothers. I have all the Harry Potters, the Lord of the Rings trilogy (and The Hobbit) and the Bourne books. I have shelves full of Agatha Christie and Rex Stout. And all eleven volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. (But please don’t ask me if I read them all.) I have Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People and his complete history of World War II. (The latter, however, only in some pretty-bad paperbacks which I picked up at one of the library sales.) I have five by David McCullough and four by Stephen Ambrose.

I love reference books. (After all, you don’t get on Jeopardy by reading People magazine.) So I have Oxford Companions to The Supreme Court, United States History, World History and World War II. Those Oxford people are really smart. And no, I don’t just sit around and read these things (well, sometimes I do) but they are good references if you want to write about historical events.

I have People’s Almanacs, and Books of Lists, and sports encyclopedias. And I have every World Almanac since 1969. It just got to be a thing so I had to buy them every year. I kept thinking they would be worth something some day. It turns out, not much.

Then, of course, there is baseball. I have not started cataloguing my baseball books yet. They take up two and a half bookcases; not counting baseball fiction like The Natural (which was very different and much better than the movie). I have spent years accumulating these, I can’t just stick them in an envelope and mail them off to some nerd in Cleveland who is curious about what Ted Williams wrote about hitting, or how Bill James began writing about baseball.

That is not to say I am hanging onto everything. I found three dictionaries. I can’t remember the last time I used a dictionary. Those are going into the recycling. For years I was too cheap to buy anything but used paperbacks. Those are pretty beat up. I will try to give those to a nursing home or something. I seem to have lost track of what I had, because I have found multiple copies of the same book. One of those will have to go.

So I am going to box most of them up, again, and find a place to store them, again, and hold onto my dream that some day I will be able to have all of my books displayed in my home. I have six bookshelves in my home now and that was not enough. Maybe someday I can manage it.

Labels: books

# posted by Miles Madorin : 3:55 PM