In my basement we have two monstrosities that pass for bookcases: the family bookcase that basically stretches some ten feet across a side wall, and mine that stretches some four feet down the side wall in front of my den. Starting with this post, we'll be doing a skewered exploration on the contents of the family bookcase, and alternate a few about my bookcase.
Our family bookcase contains about 60 years worth of books collected in a few different ways: directly purchased from bookstores, acquired on the dirt cheap (aka free) from various people who were bringing/purging their collections.
Just to give you a basic idea of what kind of books/reading material taking up space, we have the following: old mystery/sci-fi magazines; religious materials, encyclopedias, fiction, pop culture and different types of non-fiction that one would find in schools/universities. Like I said, this is just a sampling.
Wherever I walk by the bookcase, I'm always on the lookout for a particular missing repro book from the late 19th century, specifically, memoirs from the US Civil War (I bought some 35 years ago, two different Time-Life book series that totaled almost 65 volumes, each one costing, on average, $14.99 (not counting S&H) in 1980's money). When I was creating my own personal bookcase, I discovered I was missing one volume from the memoir series, thus the need for perpetually searching the bookcase.
Because of the type of books we have stashed in a bookcase that will never be read, there are titles/topics that often jump out at me, simply because of how strange the topic is. For our first example, we have this:
To be honest, I do not recall how this particular book made it to our family bookcase, but since my brother is a bit of a mild hoarder, I'm thinking it came to us courtesy of him.
Now, I know absolutely zero about cricket and I'm 100% positive that no one in the house knows anything about cricket. I think I tried watching it once or twice, but when you don't know anything about a sport that is popular everywhere except the US, you kind of say to yourself, "No." and move on.
This is but one of about two dozen sports oriented books housed within that large bookcase, which run the gamut of encyclopedias, memoirs, histories and compilations, covering mostly baseball, with a few football and one emphasizing World Cup soccer....and one that's a short history of Bundesligia, which is German soccer (fun fact: our local PBS affiliate used to host a weekly German soccer game called "Soccer Made In Germany", which my dad used to watch every Sunday.
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I have five of these highly informative baseball encyclopedias. This particular baseball encyclopedia was around from the 1970's through 2009, was a baseball junkie's wet dream. It had everything a junkie would want: a detailed synopsis of every season (both AL & NL) as well as the final standings; with a statistical breakdown of each team's total player stats; it also included a breakdown of each world series (and divisional playoffs); divided the entirety of baseball (1876 thru 2009) by periods/eras; lifetime stats were also divided by the same periods/eras; and even included the two years that the Federal League was around (1914 & 1915), fun fact: Wrigley Field initially belonged to the Chicago Whales, the Federal League ball-club before they disappeared with the Federal League did. Overall this was a fantastic detailed history about Major League Baseball.
This baseball encyclopedia was the catalyst for me getting into the minutiae of baseball for a number of years, and everything else that I've managed to come across I compare to this encyclopedia, and I found those...wanting.
This was and remains to this day, my absolute favorite encyclopedia of my absolute favorite sport (I became a NY Mets fan since I got cable t.v. in the late 70's), and it still has an influence on me as a person and as a writer to this day.
As the title of this post states, this is the 1st part of what I hope to make a reoccurring feature on this blog: a sampling of books that were read maybe once or twice, then became a part of a very eclectic collection of books that me, myself and I would ever read, as I seem to be the only hardcore reader in my household.
The book on cricket is puzzling.
ReplyDeleteWatching it is even more puzzling. I just couldn't get into it even on a basic level. This book, from what few pages I was able to skim, looks like you need to have basic understanding of it to begin with.
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