Jon Corellis said, talking about the 1500 books filling his house:
>I'm only at about fifteen per cent of (10,000), though, and
unfortunately all the
book cases I can fit into the premises are full. The obvious solution
is to
buy a bigger house.
Not necessarily, Jon. Why not just dig a deeper cellar? In Bolivia, in
the early 1980's, a library housing approximately six or seven thousand
titles, much of it junk, but including many rare antiques (not least a
great collection of colonial maps apparently purchased for very modest
prices) garnered from the mindboggling La Paz book stalls west of the
Cathedral, was discovered under a tiny tin shack in the rambling working
class suburb of El Alto. The owner, an eccentric and literate Aymara
bootblack, had dug a labyrinthine system of caves under his hovel, into
which he squirreled away, over the decades, his treasure. He lived
alone, and seems to have died without telling anyone about his cache.
One of the books is rumored to have been a Shakespeare first folio with
considerable amounts of Elizabethan-looking holographic material in the
margins, though this is not now present in the collection (there are
rumors of its whereabouts, and I may have, in fact, the chance to see
this next spring, if the reports are true). The collection is now housed
in the National Library of Bolivia. It includes early editions of
Gongora and Quevedo. There is a Kentucky Fried Chicken standing now
where this Alexandrian catacomb of text used to be.
Strange doings in the Andes...
Kent
|