Recommendations of books to read can come from friends, the internet, the local library, etc. I had an email from a bookseller recommending a whole list of books similar to one I had recently purchased. I succumbed to the bait and ended up purchasing an old book that I had somehow missed along the way. The book I bought is a reprint of a book written maybe100 years ago. A book about travel to Tibet. It set me to thinking about the books we had in the bookcase in the living room of the house where I grew up in Belmont Massachusetts.

My mother and father and also my older brother and sisters were great readers. But I think the books in the bookcase represented my father’s taste in reading in the 1920’s and ’30s. I remember the complete set of books by Mark Twain and We by Charles Lindbergh. Also a book by John Marquand.

There were also 2 thin blue books full of genealogical information of my father’s ancestors. These blue books fascinated me and I perused them on many a rainy day. There was also a white box, the size of a men’s shoe box, full of family photos – what a treasure. This too captured my attention for many many hours. What happened to the items in the bookcase?

The years went by, my father died, we children grew up and moved on, and my mother accepted a job in Maui Hawaii. So my mother sold the house and my sisters took some of the contents. I know that my sister Ruth took the 2 genealogy books – I was able to look at them again for many years until she passed away in 2017. I suspect that she took the box of photographs also but I never thought to ask her about that. I don’t think any of the books were distributed to family members. They would have been of interest to an Antiquarian Book Seller, but I’m quite sure that such action didn’t happen. When the house was sold my mother was already in Maui and my sisters just had one day to come from Connecticut and New Hampshire to claim what special items they wanted or could use.