Dusty and old


Wednesday is a fickle day…. sometimes I love it, and sometimes I hate it.

This week, I love it.

My father-in-law called me this afternoon and left me a message letting me know that a package had arrived for me. How exciting!!
I was pretty sure I knew what it was, as my mum was sending me a box of books. They are getting ready to sell the house, and are cleaning things out….. and I have way too many books

(while I am writing this, I am sucked into BattleStar Galactica….)

Anyways, sure enough those books arrived, and what a thrill it was to open the box!

My Granny’s books that she had passed on to me…

3 mini volumes of Shakespeare that I used to eye longingly when I visited her house. They were so little, just the size a young girl would find especially appealing (Remember when anything little was so desirable? Tiny writing, teeny My Little Ponys, Cabbage Patch Preemies, very small stickers….)
(Best episode of BSG ever… and now I have moved on to a dvr’d episode of Leverage)

When I was in Uni finishing up my English degree, my sweet Granny broke the news that our family had a famous relative that was a writer.
This was pretty much the most exciting news I had ever heard, and I immediately headed to my University’s extensive library to locate his books. And to my delight, there they were!!

His name is Charles Reade, and he was a contemporary of Dickens. I guess my Granny had a set of his books, family inherited, that she had thoughtfully ruined by storing them in my mum’s drafty, poorly insulated shed (a shed that my sister and I painfully remember painting many summers ago).

So those poor books, who lounged alone in a damp cardboard box for years, were freed when my interest in literature was revealed. I love my Granny and I know shes a little absentminded…. but those poor books.

Mum and I took them to an antique book dealer, who told us that there was no point in even attempting to have them restored…. they were just too far gone…. oh poor darling books…

They have joined us down in Florida, where they will have a better home than that damp shed.

Funnily enough, one of my sister’s old books joined the batch that was sent down. I only knew it was my sisters as it had the name of one of her high school boyfriends in it (who I will only refer to as Mr Camoflague). It was full of pressed flowers from her 18th birthday….

Now I only need a proper bookshelf to store them on. And they might lounge for a little in the box that they arrived in…

Regardless, they completely brightened up my Wednesday!

2 Comments

Filed under Charles Reade, dusty, family

2 responses to “Dusty and old

  1. Tamsin

    wow J that was a great blog, I almost got a little teary eyed as I remember you talking about these books and how excited you were when you found out about them. I know they have found a loving home and will spend their time being loved and cared for. It reminds me of some Expo 86 stuff my dad got for me cause he worked on the project, stuff only family got, I stored them in my aunts basement and it flooded and they were pretty much ruined, but I have hung onto them anyways because of the memories they hold, so I truly understand the symbolism behind those old keepsakes.
    what dorks we are to get all misty eyed over some moldy old books!! I love it

  2. Jaime

    Awww T, we are such book-nerds, its ridiculous…. That is awful that your keepsakes got ruined. I probably wouldn’t have gotten rid of that stuff either. I have drawers of things I just can’t bear to part with. Little bit of pack-rat in me, I guess…

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s
https://atlanticmama.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/dusty-and-old/
atlanticmama.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-39
72462
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:CUN5ERLZN6YHPKDVOFMIHF7OBKL6RH5M
<urn:uuid:2ddfacc5-576f-4363-ac96-94a16bd1b6b0>
2021-09-19T16:19:11Z
192.0.78.12
text/html
sha1:UFWXRH5UZCIY55WTKC3IMKNLTRFC6TZ5
<urn:uuid:061af5de-7077-41dc-8d91-943ed30d1e7d>
https://atlanticmama.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/dusty-and-old/
response
<urn:uuid:421c04da-e2b7-486b-b320-9dcd293777c0>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-39
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-177
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/