Unexpected Treasures

It's no secret that I have too many books. I don't know how that happens.  I make piles of books to give away to second-hand book sales and still my shelves are full.  I make it a rule not to buy a book unless I can't get it as an audiobook (first choice) or an e-book (second choice) but there are some books that aren't available in either format.  Then there are the magazines.  I read some of them and then give them away to unsuspecting teacher friends for art projects or I put them in the recycling. That doesn't apply to the woodworking mags though. I keep them and they are taking up more and more shelf space. I have gone to an online subscription for one of them and I find I don't look at it very often and I like being able to trot out to the shop with several magazines on a given topic under my arm.

I recently discovered that the public library will accept books, up to 20 at a time. Good chance, I thought, to go through my books, put some in a bag and drop them off at the library the next time I'm by.  I started on a box in the basement that I haven't opened for quite a while thinking that I could easily just put the contents in the bag. If I had dumped them into the bag without looking that would have worked; however I didn't.  I took each one out and looked at it. Some I put back in the box; some went into the bag, and others I brought upstairs to have a look at before I put them in the bag.

Six made the trip upstairs, books by Thornton W. Burgess that I remember loving as a kid.  One has my father's name in it and the inscription, "Christmas 1920."  My dad would have been 7 years old. I think Mum read all of the books to me and I probably had all of them at one time.  Somehow these six have survived the cut. I chose the one with Dad's name in it. The cover has come off and there are stains on some of the pages.  My ten or eleven-year-old hand added my name to the front of the book and recopied the title. As I read The Adventures of Prickly Porky I found myself smiling and then laughing out loud at the antics of the anthropomorphic animals. I was prepared to turn up my nose: talking animals sometimes have a bad rap in children's literature. I was delighted all over again.  Yes, the stories are a bit preachy in spots but the characters are engaging and, although they talk (sometimes in accents), they behave very much as animals do.  Even though the porcupine and the dog both have names and personalities, the porcupine curls up and whacks the dog across the snout with his tail when the dog comes close enough to sniff him. The dog runs off in pain and the porcupine uncurls himself and goes about his business. That's what dogs and porcupines do. None of the major characters is killed off by their natural enemies but I have no doubts in reading the stories that they could be. That's what predatory and prey species do.

I wanted to find out more about the guy who wrote these books so I went off on a google hunt and turned up some information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton_Burgess He was prolific and there is a school and a couple of conservation organizations named after him. He wrote an autobiography which I'd like to read but it's not available as an e-book and the two copies I managed to track down are going for $85.00 US.  I don't want to read it that badly. There is one volume of his collected works available as an e-book but not in Canada. By that point I realized that I was kidding myself if I thought I was going to put those books in a bag for the library. I'm going to read the other five and then put them back into the box in the basement where I can discover them all over again in a few years. In the meantime I'll attack the bookshelves in my study to see if I can't get twenty books to put in the van for the next time I'm near a library.