Back to Normal? (7 cents)

Our ten year old guest is now back with his mother, having spent just a fine week with us. He was a delight to have, but took up a lot of time. Thus, I did not have a chance to prepare new postings last week.

This one will simply be a rundown of what has been happening. Or not.

I have been spending quite a bit of time trying to sort out the thousands of books I have, organizing them, and getting rid of some of them. Yesterday, I carted away almost 300 books. Some went to the local Bryn Mawr book store in Georgetown, and others went to the Stone Ridge Country Day School for their annual mammoth book sale.

It opened a few shelves in a large walk in closet that I have, but didn't really make a dent in anything. But it gave me a chance to go through books I had not touched in years. (I think I went through about 1/3 of that closet, and got rid of about half of the books I looked at.)

As to the books I saved, I tried to limit them to books that were (a) of possible use to me in the future, (b) autographed, (c) of some value, or (d) nicely illustrated.

As to value, I generally go to www.abebooks.com, which is probably the best source for used books on the web. Usually, you can find any book you are interested in. It is rare when you cannot, and usually it is a book in a foreign language. For example, I have a copy of a novel called "Arnold Beer", written by German Jewish author Max Brod, published in the 1920s in a nice edition. I have never seen a copy for sale anywhere.

There are a few books, which I learned this week were worth more than I thought. An example of this is a book about St. Louis called "St. Louis in Fruheren Jahren", published in St. Louis in 1983. I have a nice copy. The three copies for sale on Abebooks are listed at between $175 and $200. Then, there is "Sketches in England, France and Scotland, written by F.A. Abbot (and originally published in the New Orleans Picayune), published in New York in 1858. My copy is signed. You can buy a signed copy for $250, but mine is not in very good condition (that is not quite honest; the spine has come completely away at the front. A third example is called "Benner's Prophecies", which are actually prophecies as to the future of commodity prices, published in 1879 in Cincinnati. It is a small book, in fairly decent shape. There are two copies for sale for about $500 each. This is hard for me to believe.

I have not finished a book over the past week or so, again because of diversions, but I am in the middle of three interesting books. One is Jonathan Safran Foer's "Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close" or something like that. I am about 1/4 through the book, which is very enjoyable. Second, I am reading Spalding Gray's "Impossible Vacation", a novel which I assume has some autobiographical content (in fact, I thought I was reading a memoir until I looked back at the cover and saw the word 'novel'). Gray wrote very well; his suicide last year was clearly tragic. I know little about him. Finally, I am reading a book by Lowell Thomas. This one is called "Back to Mandalay Bay", and was the story of the Burma campaign of World War II. Much more interesting than you might imagine.

I have also been spending a fair amount of time preparing for a study group presentation tonight on "Columbus the Jew". Was Christopher Columbus (by background and ancestry) Jewish, and is the question of any relevance whatsoever. Columbus set out for (what became) America on the day following the final expulsion of the Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus, like Shakespeare and Jesus, have been studied in extraordinary detail; yet the details are elusive. He was most likely from Genoa, but did not speak Italian. The question is whether or not his parents, or grandparents, or great grandparents, were in fact Jewish refugees from the 1391 pogrom in Barcelona. There are passionate (and reasoned) arguments on all sides. But the upshot is that, no matter how much we try to figure out something historical, we will fail to be definitive.

Tomorrow is Columbus Day, and Wednesday night Kol Nidre, so again we have a week that will be unusual, but the goal is to keep the postings coming.