Alan Loney will be fascinated by this Chris.
But I cant believe you couldnt find a 2nd hand store to at least take
them off you (surely there would be other poor students looking for
2nd hand copies of such texts?). I'm pretty sure such books would find
a few cents anyway, here.
UAlberta has the largest library between Toronto & Vancouver, & it
collects, so I give them books, & they can find places in other
colleges in the province for those it already has.
Also, it sounds like UWS was just being stupid; it wouldnt have cost
that much to rent storage space till they could build a library, surely?
Terrible tale.
Doug
On 6-Aug-09, at 3:28 AM, Chris Jones wrote:
> Max, pass this on and others may like this story. (I don't claim
> copyright so be free to do as you wish with this story.)
>
> I have heard that when the University of Western Sydney was set up it
> was given a huge donations of books from the University of Sydney but
> did not have the funds to house this collection so instead they were
> forced to dig a hole and bury these books. (Not sure, but this story
> may
> be from the Sydney Morning Herald.)
>
> My undergrad and grad degrees were at NSWIT and UTS and the library
> was
> so short of important texts I either had to purchase the needed books
> from Gleebooks or visit that imposing grey building beside the Fisher
> Library at Sydney Uni known as the Book Stack.
>
> Ill health and my inability to carry my acquired library with me meant
> that these books I had acquired also went into landfill, since they
> had
> little value being so specialised and as such no market could be found
> for them. Books like, A Thousand Plateau and Of Grammatology, not to
> mention most of Freud's writings, Progress Publisher edition of
> Capital,
> Aperture editions of Robert Frank, The Americans, first edition of
> Ansel
> Adam's, the Negative, most of Aperture's editions such as Walker Evans
> et al. All of these went to land fill. A book collector and seller
> will
> probably say we are dealing with at least $10,000 dollars worth of
> books. And I haven't yet started on my first editions of Gertrude
> Stein
> and Djuna Barnes. I still do have my second Faber edition of the
> Orators, but WH Auden isn't worth that much. I did also have a first
> edition of Pound's Cantos, at that time of no worth except to the odd
> specialist.
>
> Anyways, having been a research student at UWS the books they were
> able
> to afford to put on their library shelves are a living gold mine.
> Also,
> today I get pleading letters from UTS asking for donations to their
> library.
Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
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There are as many fools in the world as there are people.
Sigmund Freud
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