Books and History

I decided to get serious today about cleaning my apartment. Today I wanted to tackle my books and bookcases. I already Pledged the bookcases, dusted my books with my little Swiffer duster (it is gentle on my books), and rearranged my books on the shelves. I have a lot of books--the result of several years in college and grad school. The sad thing is that the books I have here in Colorado are only the ones I used while I was studying Classics. I have boxes and boxes of books back home in California. Those books are from the years when I was an English major, so you can imagine how many more books I have. One of these days when I have enough money to buy my own place with a little more room for a library, I'm going to put all of my books together. As much as I love the Classics (and by Classics I mean Greek and Latin), I miss reading the other "classics." Sometimes you just want to put down the Aeschylus, Aristotle, Plato, and Homer, and you want to pick up Austen, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, or Hemingway instead. It will be nice one of these days to have a complete library of all of my books. As I think of it, I must have about 200-300 books total, and I can't even imagine how much it is all worth. There are some books, though, that you can't put a price on like a copy of Homer's Iliad (in Greek) that was printed in 1870.


On the inside of the front cover is a written note "From L. & E. M. Fisher, Dec. 25, 1886." It was obviously a Christmas gift to someone. Inside the book is a slip of paper that the previous reader was using as a bookmark. It looks like it was a single sheet from a page-a-day type of calendar. This sheet has a nice, ink drawing of what I assume to be a bank. In fact it is from the "Ohio National Bank on Cor. High and Town Sts. in Columbus, Ohio." They offer "Foreign Exchange, Money Orders, and Travelers' Cheques." The date on this calendar sheet is Tuesday, October 8, 1929. It's interesting to imagine that about 21 days later the stock market crashed on October 29 and not long after there was the Great Depression. I wonder what happened to this book. Did the owner keep it because it is something precious? Or did the owner have to sell it just to make some money to get through a few days during the Depression? It is amusing to consider the history of this book and to think of the fact that it is in my hands now.