2016 — 4 August: Thursday
As far as I know, of the books I bought in November 1984 precisely three now survive.
Is it not said1 "The Devil finds Books for Idle Hands to Cull"? — or, to put it another way, my battered copy of Umberto Eco's first novel "The Name of the Rose" is among those titles that are now about to leave the building. It's only possible to read any book for the first time once, of course. And (in this case) I simply feel no need to dive ever again into William Weaver's excellent translation of Eco's (whisper it quietly) frankly turgid text. Still, it was £2.95 well spent as by far the cheapest of the three titles. And I now have a Blu-ray of the film that easily stands up to repeat watching.
The two survivors can stay a bit longer. As usual, a shiny piece of artwork responds poorly to the flatbed scanning. I like the fascinating variations in the skill of the cover designers, the calligrapher, and typographers.
My sibling...
... asserts that this was taken in 1959 on Orkney. He could be right. Though I also believe it might have been taken in Abersoch.
I could wish he'd take pity on my broadband and do some image compression before attaching these scans to his email. This one clocked in at 9.2MB before I, erm, reduced it on arrival.
Let's see...
Big Bro's email question re sluggish performance? Yep, answered, quite politely.
Shopping? Yep, did that before breakfast.
Lunch? Yep, did that at the Fisher's Pond, several hours ago.
Afternoon chats? Just concluded the second.
Better make a cuppa, then, hadn't you? And on with the cull.
It's cousin Clive's fault!
He introduced me to the music of Amon Düül II, back in 1971. So, by the time Christa came into my life, I was already predisposed to like raucous, jazz-oriented, "Krautrock". And there was an excellent music shop in Bad Kreuznach, just a few miles from Meisenheim.
Now I've belatedly discovered this group, who were exact contemporaries.
From a book...
... published one year before I was born:
Page 422 states: "A new type of amplifier called the transistor was recently announced by the Bell Telephone Laboratories. It seems likely that this device will simplify computer circuits considerably."
Whatever happened to transistors, I wonder?
Now that I can...
... automagically and easily list my book purchases by date order within genre I can clearly track some surprising changes in my book-buying habits in the nearly nine years since Christa's death. And I can see some heartening signs of return to normality, too. Fascinating, if only to me. And my therapist. (Wait! I don't have a therapist!)
:-)