I am a middle-aged book collector. For a long time, I was the young guy on the gay mystery collector scene. As we get older, the friends I’ve made are starting to unload their books as they downsize their collections and possessions. The wonderful thing about that is I am the first person they contact about selling their books to, but the bad part of my friends downsizing is I am the first person they reach out to.
It is the holiday season and time to stock up on books and chocolate for the Icelandic tradition of Jolabokaflod, or Christmas Book Flood! Of course, there are dozens of holidays in December, and I think buying books for any gift-giving is wonderful. Still, I strongly discourage my own family from buying me books, since they would have no idea what I own or what I would want. A gift card to my favorite local bookshop is just fine.
There once was a man named Joseph Sabin. He was born in England in 1821 and moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He opened a bookstore and wrote a multivolume bibliography entitled Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America. What his very brief Wikipedia page left out is that while in Philadelphia he borrowed a great deal of money to buy books to stock his store.
I live in Michigan which just announced that along with the CDC’s mask recommendation that fully vaccinated people no longer have to wear masks indoors. However, the state is less than 50% fully vaccinated, and I worry about a new spike due to non-vaccinated people parading around as if they are vaccinated. This gets me back to pride. In 2020 Pride events were cancelled or moved to virtual spaces.
I work in an academic library, and although I have my master’s in information and library science, I am not a librarian. Rather I answer the phone, and if patrons have a harder question that is outside the knowledge of our student workers (which is rare since they know all), I help find the answer.
