Moving

My Mumsy is moving out of the family house after twenty-five years in residence.

Normally, this wouldn’t be worthy of mention - except for a few piteous complaints about the mountain of boxes to be moved - but over the course of the move I have made a literary conquest of sorts….

Specifically, I acquired much of my mother’s share of her parents’ books.

To sum, my grandparents were war-ruined. Before World War Two, they were only children with money and leisure. My grandfather, for instance, was on his version of the family world-tour rite-of-passage, working as a lumberjack in British Columbia, when the war broke out. For her part, my grandmother was a teenager in a mansion in The Hague.

They met during the allied sweep of Holland and married two weeks later.

Sounds romantic, but consider that my grandmother was malnourished when she was pregnant with my mother, her first child. Or that they moved soon after to the outskirts of what-was-to-become-Thunder-Bay soon after, with no money and very few practical skills.

After having five children in a very short time and keeping both cats and dogs, my grandmother went back to university. She eventually became the manager of Lakehead University’s bookstore.

To make a long story short, between my grandparents' ancestral books and the books my grandmother acquired as a professional book-handler, they amassed quite a collection.

Of this storied assemblage, my mother snafued roughly a third, which have sat on her shelves for ten years. I snafued roughly two-thirds of her share, which amounted to four or five boxes and included a variety of plummy books, such as:

The 12 vol. set of The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant
The 6 vol. set of The Memoirs of Casanova (translated by Arthur Machen)
The Works of Rabelais
An illustrated edition of Poems by Edgar A. Poe (engravings and ornaments by J.-G. Daragues)
An illustrated edition of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (paintings by Sarkis Katchadourian)

There's much good reading ahead, I think...