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All that talk about crappy old books…

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Please see NOTES below

… yesterday really put me in the mood to spend some time with my little home library.

I am ashamed to say I have neglected my Preserving Western Culture One Crappy Old Book at a Time project in recent months. In fact, I’ve only added eighteen volumes to my library since last October.

One, Beautiful Gems of Thought and Sentiment Being a Vast Treasury of Choice Productions in Poetry, Prose and Song from the Literature and Music of All Ages (1890), my mother gave to me. Given the handwriting on the inside cover, it must have come from my dad’s family– probably my grandmother or great aunt Bertha. And I’ve just read the saddest thing.

Another, Magyar Történelmi Emelékek (1857) I liberated from a storeroom/library in Budapest. It was marked as a duplicate: “duplum,” double. The title page, Hungary Historical Memories, front matter, Preface (Eloszo), and chapter summaries are in Hungarian. The rest is in Latin and French (there are two distinct parts). As far as I can tell, it’s a bunch of Hungarian historical documents or travelogues from 1441 through 1538.

Make of this what you will.

The third, The Age We Live In: A History of the Nineteenth Century, from the Peace of 1815 to the Present Time— that being 1888– is a multi-volume set. And truth be told, I got snookered which is something that very rarely happens. It’s an eight volume set. I have Vols. I through VII. But I also have duplicates of three of those. Did discover a nice illustration of Lord Melbourne, which I shared with Daughter C. She loves Victoria.

NOTES

  1. Not included in the data set used to generate this graph are the 520 (I counted) books Daughter C and the J-Man left up in the apartment. Were those catalogued and included, the graph would skew to the right, as they took almost all of the crappy old books.
  2. “Publication Decade” refers to the year in which the actual physical book on the shelf was published. Each electronic card catalog entry includes that year, and the original (first) copyright / publication date. But the tag each entry has (from which these data were generated) is for the physical book’s year of publication. Clear as mud? A Rubaiyat published in 1911 is tagged 1911, not 1858. Maybe if I were starting out cataloging today, I’d do it differently. But it’s too late now.
  3. The distribution may surprise but shouldn’t. Consider encyclopedia sets, both adult and children’s. For purposes of the catalog, each has a single entry. But for purposes of a book count, I used the number of volumes in each set. Eight of the 14 single-entry sets of encyclopedias I have were published 1950-1979. That’s 179 books.
  4. The distribution may surprise but shouldn’t (2). For reasons on which we might want to speculate, the ’60s through the ’80s saw the publication of a lot of multi-volume how-to type sets, and great books sets. A lot of these were gotten by subscription– like limited edition magazines. Those of a certain age will remember commercials advertising these. Many of the ones that found their way to my shelves still have removable post-cards for “you may like” other sets. Fill out the post-card, mail it in, pay the bill once a month (10% discount if you pay in full!) and get a book every month.
  5. The distribution may surprise but shouldn’t (3). Remember the Horizon collection? Did it as a Books of the Month a few years ago. They’re all from the ’60s-’70s, too.
  6. FYI: I have two books published in 1848– Volume III & IV of Macaulay’s History of England– but you can’t see it on the graph.

Fun fact: 860 books are tagged “history.” Preserving Western Culture One Crappy Old Book at a Time.