Well, I’m jealous.
So, I was listening to NPR on the way home today and there was an interesting story about the Library of Congress. They currently have an exhibit with Thomas Jefferson’s library. After the war of 1812 when the British burned down the Congressional Library, Jefferson sold his personal library to Congress. It was, at the time, the largest private collection in the US. It contained somewhere around 5500 books/pamphlets. Congress gave him $24,000 (about $330,000 in 2008 dollars). His collection had books in English, French, Latin and Italian and he could read in all of those languages.
In comparison, my current library is pretty poor. I haven’t even read everything that I own. The vast majority of the books that I own are textbooks that I kept from college. Of all the other books that I have, I think the coolest is the 1934 printing of Canterbury Tales. I’ll get around to reading it one of these days.
View my Linkedin profile
June 29th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Wait, what? You kept a lot of your books from college? The only stuff I found useful was my Japanese language books/CD as well as a few operating CS books. Everything else was garbage.
June 30th, 2008 at 5:35 am
There was a several year period where I didn’t sell any of my textbooks because I figured they might be useful one day. I’ll have to figure out how to get rid of them one of these days.
June 30th, 2008 at 6:32 am
If you’re lucky some places might still be teaching with those editions. See if you can sell them through Amazon or something. You could always donate them to somewhere. I’m not sure how many people are going to really be looking for “Giancoli Physics”, but I suppose that’s better than nothing.
June 30th, 2008 at 7:44 am
The reason I still have that book is because they stopped using that edition after I had finished with the class.
June 30th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Haha. I’m laughing so hard right now. So many of us still have their Giancoli Physics. Damn book! Hahahaha!