Sometimes trying to be a good parent can be hard work. My dear son informed me needed some documents from his last year at school. I said: it’s in your ‘My School Days’ book (where we kept all their reports, certificates, photos, reprimands, even artworks as wee kindy kids. I know. I know. It’s kind of neat to look back at though.) which is still in the container, with most of our books, and hasn’t been unpacked for 4 and half years, with moving the house, and the house fight. There are around 60 boxes, waiting.
“Well, I really need it, Dad.”
So, guess who spent 9 hours unpacking and repacking dusty boxes of books in a container full of furniture and beds. Trying to move boxes onto piles of boxes, and not break anything including myself. It was the last box I looked in, because I wasn’t going to look in the other four for just for sport. Yes, I know, I should have, in the spirit of the thing, but after 9 hours I had had enough.
Still, it was not without its compensations – besides hayfever, a sinus headache and a sore back. I did get thanked… and I had the reward that goes to every bibliophile who ever unpacked his books. Besides dust, I mean. And the ‘why the hell did I ever keep this?’ reaction to various books.
Yes, the rediscovery of old friends. The delight of discovering I actually HAVE a copy a book I love but had entirely forgotten. A trove of books I must re-read. Even one or two I hadn’t read, and now can. Yes, I have a fair number on my kindle, and probably a couple of hundred physical books out of the store – but I have many thousands. I was kind of aware that I was digging through centuries of the hard work of better authors than I will ever be – quite a lot of whom are just about forgotten and totally un-PC these days. From TINTIN to Arthur Upfield, from books on the Roman Army to books on the medicinal uses of herbs.
I promise I didn’t come back with more than twenty. Well, thirty. I am enjoying SUMMER OF THE DRAGON at the moment. As a writer, just hastily going through the boxes, I felt the stirrings of a slew of ideas, stringing disparate concepts in the jumble I would normally never see together. But there it is: There is a time, little book-dragons, for going back through that trove.
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “Trove”
Talking about “old friends,” years ago my grandmother found a bunch of Leo G. Edwards books (the Jerry Todd and Poppy Ott books) that had belonged to my dad and his brothers. Since we were about the same age as they had been when they read them, she passed them on to us, and we really enjoyed them.
I read my father’s copies of those books as well. Fun stories of boys with gumption making things happen plus a window into a lost world.
They are still in my book collection.
I think ours bit the dust after we finished with them. They had been printed during WW2 and the paper was falling apart. Those were the days when they actually wrote fiction for boys…
Fiction for boys was a godsend for girls. We fell upon them, too. The “girl” books were, by and large, feeble stuff. (Compare The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew). There are a few with merit, but numerically small compared to what the boys had.
If you wanted adventure books, it almost had to be in fiction for boys, since that’s where all the older adventure books ended up (Robin Hood, Count of Monte Cristo, King Arthur, Three Musketeers, Jungle Books, etc.). It’s no coincidence that so many conservative women are so sympathetic to “male virtues” — we were inculcated with them as children, too. We wanted to grow up to be avengers with swords, not damsels in distress. (Think of Jo in Little Women when she creates her plays for her sisters.)
Oh! I haven’t reread Arthur Upfield (mysteries set in Australia, detective is Aboriginal) in ages. Heh. Yeah, probably not as Non-PC as some others . . . maybe. I’ll have to check.
Hardy Boys… they were the first ones I ‘owned’, and read multiple times! And glad you found what he needed!
Speaking of “Found Books”, I remember reading a SF book that I found at my grandparents house.
Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet by Blake Savage (a pseudonym of Harold L. Goodwin)
It was a fun read and is available on Project Gutenberg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_Foster_Rides_the_Gray_Planet