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Anne of Green Gables
Aug. 14th, 2012 09:42 amMy grandmother died earlier this summer, and the family - on the grounds that I was the only one likely to read them - let me abscond with some of the old books from her bookshelves.
The Montgomerys - these are my grandma's folks - seem to have stopped buying books in about 1920. There's a sorry story, here, I think, a once-prosperous family just barely hanging onto the farm as farm prices fell in the twenties.
Tragedy aside, it's convenient for me that they should have so many books that fall exactly within my time frame. I sorted the shelves, puffs of dust rising, and skeins of old spiderweb draping over my fingers and attaching themselves to my shirt. They had the books packed two deep in the bookshelf. I set the first layer up in precarious stacks, praying, don't fall, because some of these books were old enough that a slip would be the death of them.
And in that second rank of books - tucked in the shadows at the back of the shelf - I found my treasures:
The Montgomerys - these are my grandma's folks - seem to have stopped buying books in about 1920. There's a sorry story, here, I think, a once-prosperous family just barely hanging onto the farm as farm prices fell in the twenties.
Tragedy aside, it's convenient for me that they should have so many books that fall exactly within my time frame. I sorted the shelves, puffs of dust rising, and skeins of old spiderweb draping over my fingers and attaching themselves to my shirt. They had the books packed two deep in the bookshelf. I set the first layer up in precarious stacks, praying, don't fall, because some of these books were old enough that a slip would be the death of them.
And in that second rank of books - tucked in the shadows at the back of the shelf - I found my treasures:
