Home-library discoveries

The home library that Bill the spouse and I have built up over a total of 90 years of adulthood, between the two of us, now sprawls over seven rooms in our Charlottesville home and one in our DC apartment. (Oh, and he also has may yards of bookshelves in his professorial office, too.) So okay, it’s not completely surprising that often individual items get mislaid…
This morning I was reorganizing some of the space in my home office, to make room for the new project I’m working on. It’s always a good task to do. For me, it helps me focus on whatever I’m about to launch into while also reminding me of many of the resources I’ve gathered for past projects, that can often very helpfully be repurposed today.
Three great discoveries this morning:

    1. Two good, clean, printouts of a lengthy series of articles I wrote about Jerusalem in 1995. Yay! I’ve been thinking for a while I should look for those on a ‘floppy disk’ (remember those?) and then find a way to read the floppy disk and re-use the articles in some way. Now all I need to do is scan one of these printouts into a PDF. I even recently bought a new program called ReadIris that’s pretty good at converting PDF’s into regular word-processing programs…. So now I’m just about set with repackaging/ re-using that now almost “vintage” piece of 1995 reporting.
    2. A copy of Elizabeth Monroe’s great 1982 study Britain’s Moment in the Middle East 1917-41. I was looking for that book with some urgency just the other day, and couldn’t find it. This morning, as I restacked some books from my study onto a shelf in our guestroom, there it was!
    3. Archibald Baxter’s We Will not Cease, which is a most amazing testimony by a young New Zealander who underwent horrendous privations when he tried to uphold his religious principles as a conscientious objector during WW-I. New Zealand made no provision at all for conscientious objection during that war. When Baxter refused to put on the uniform they shipped him in a troop-ship in his underwear to France and at one point in the lengthy narrative even tied him to a cross for two or three nights, in a military base in northern France, during a snowstorm… I actually wanted to quote a few excerpts from the book when I wrote here recently about the enlistment in the N.Z. Rifles in 1914 of my great-uncle Cyril Marlow… But I couldn’t find it at the time. Now I have. Yay!

So, just more reminders that doing a good office reorganization from time to time is a really good idea…