August 24, 2024

How depressing is it to find a bunch of great ideas tucked away in storage?

Well, that's what I find in another repurposed Amazon book. A huge . . . and incredibly heavy . . . box, it contains 75 books. They range all over the place, hitting many of the themes already noted for the previous dozen boxes: Australian writers, cheap mysteries, well-known, bestselling authors, books from my graduate school days. In fact, if I stopped there, the theme for this box might have been tied to my graduate studies, as any box with "Desire Under The Elms," "The Canterbury Tales," "The Real Inspector Hound," "Soul On Ice," " The Scarlet Letter," "All My Sons," "The Collected Works of Victor Hugo," and "The Rise of Silas Lapham" provides a great swath across the beauty that is literary studies.

However, most of these books are not adding the heft to this beast of a box. That is provided by twelve books from my in-laws that Pix and I took when we bought our first home, all of them part of the "Great Ideas" series put out by Encyclopedia Britannica. My Mother-In-Law's house had a whole wall in her living room dedicated to this collection, which had probably served her kids quite well through their schooling. Because my wife is the youngest, we must have been the logical ones to take the collection. Or, more likely, the older siblings all showed no interest in a massive set of books that smelled musty and of cigarette smoke.

But, that didn't stop us, because we had this weekness for such magnificent sets of books. They could easily be added to some similar sets of books my parents had always had, and which we also absconded with.

The problem is that we have limited space to show off all of these cool old series of books. In our current home, we loved the idea of putting them on a stair landing in our entrance way, a really pretentious way to tell the (few) people who enter our house that we are pretty serious thinkers (this being written by the guy who once giggled maniacally while writing about college bathroom naming opportunities). You have to admit it is a pretty cool looking bookcase:

By the way, starting at the top, those first two shelves (minus the one stupid outlier) and the last shelf (minus a similar single outlier) are part of my In-laws' collection, two shelves of Great Ideas' series, the bottom shelf a 20-volume set called "Outline of Knowledge." The third shelf, plus the additional two books, are part of the Modern Library series from my family. I just found 13 additional Modern Library series books tucked behind the facing books on shelf 3. I am sure William Faulkner is a little disappointed to be not front and center, but I have more modern editions of Faulkner in the fiction section of our house. As for George Meredith tucked away in obscurity, I have no solace. Sorry, George, someone had to miss the cut.

Anyway, the Encyclopedia Britannica "Great Books" that couldn't make the cut is a 9-volume "Program Book Collection," published in 1959, each volume offering detailed insight into specific topics, such as mathematics, ethics, medicine. I find online that someone recently sold their set for $75, which, given the shape of ours, makes me very unlikely to look to sell them. We also have ended up storing a few annual updates to the original "Great Ideas" series, although when you already have a series featuring volumes devoted solely to Kant, Copernicus, Marx, Machiavelli, Thomas Aquinas (2 volumes at that!), and pretty much the history of great thinkers in the 50-some main collection, what update could 1967 really have provided?

These books provide such a fascinating snapshot history, not because of their content, per se, but because of the context: massive, static multi-volume reference works marketed as a core necessity for a young family. Visions of door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen seem as antiquated as door-to-door milkmen. Even by the time Lincoln was in school, encyclopedias on CD-Roms were all the rage, which is why it is all the funnier that I reference another box downstairs, one I will call 13B so that I don't have to write about it separately. In that box is a Childcraft encyclopedia set my sister gave to me after my nephews had gone to college, figuring that it may be useful for Lincoln's schooling. Not sure how much he cracked one of these during his secondary education, although to be fair, I am not sure how much he cracked any educational-based book during those years. By the time he got to college, he could Google anything and everything.

I think that is the real sobering moment here. These massive sets of books must be sitting in a lot of basements, attics, storage units, maybe even garages. There were a lot of trees sacrificed so that every home could have the Encyclopedia Britannica. That should depress me more. However, as I have been writing this, a section of the woods by my house has been bulldozed down so that a house can be built. I'd rather have a tree sacrificed for a great idea than a great room.