Another long gap…! We moved again, to the VERY old, very small house mentioned in the previous post. The books had to go, or at least most of them. My new office is tiny…

… and I have space for only a couple of hundred books in here.

What did I do with the rest? That’s rather a sad tale.

I had thought that I would be able to sell them, but this didn’t work out quite as planned. I had bar-coded all the books with stickers, like library books. Obsessive? Moi? Well, actually there was a sensible reason. As I packed them into boxes at our old house, I scanned the labels and recorded which books were in each of the 100-or-so numbered mover’s crates. The idea was that I would keep the crates in the attic, yet be able to instantly identify which box contained the book I wanted.

The fragility of our little house prevented this – and the bar-codes prevented me from selling the books. Shops I approached were interested … until I mentioned the stickers. Then they said “No.”

Even book charities refused them as a gift, and the low-point came when it looked like I would have to hire a couple of skips and send them to landfill – at considerable expense. But eventually I found a charity that accepted the whole lot.

There is a happy ending to this story. Without my own library, I now spend more time in the London library, which has much newer books, and far more of them. So the research I do now is more thorough and up-to-date!