{"id":41,"date":"2010-03-07T23:45:32","date_gmt":"2010-03-07T23:45:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/2010\/03\/07\/the_fate_of_peters_books\/"},"modified":"2018-01-05T02:41:54","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T02:41:54","slug":"the_fate_of_peters_books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/2010\/03\/07\/the_fate_of_peters_books\/","title":{"rendered":"The fate of Peter’s books"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an entry from late 2007, Dobe asked what happened to Peter’s books<\/a>. I was going to finally post a comment on that entry to supply some answers just now, when I realized that I might as well make it a full entry instead of a comment.<\/p>\n

So here goes:<\/p>\n

Peter had a lot of books at the end. Most of them were smoke-damaged.<\/p>\n

I went through the whole house during that first week after his death and took all the books that I was interested in: books I remembered from childhood, books I thought Peter had particularly liked, books that looked like they might be rare, anything else that seemed worth taking. Carted them all off to Jordan and Crystal’s garage.<\/p>\n

I left the vast majority of his books in the house\u2014at least two-thirds of them, probably quite a bit more. I think I made some estimates at the time about how many books there were in the house, and how many I was taking, but I don’t remember the numbers. I was sad to leave so many behind, but I didn’t want them, nobody else in the family expressed any interest in them, and they were smoke-damaged so I didn’t think they could be sold or given away. And I was pretty overwhelmed in general.<\/p>\n

I assume that when the bank (?) came and cleaned out everything in the house prior to starting restoration work, that they took the books as well. I would have expected them to end up in a Dumpster, unfortunately. But I vaguely recall Jay saying that the bank had put all the stuff from the house in storage at some point; I’m not sure what ended up happening there.<\/p>\n

A while later, I came back up to Tacoma and, over the course of a couple of days at Jordan and Crystal’s place, I filled several large cardboard boxes with the books I had taken from the house. Then I mailed the boxes home to myself.<\/p>\n

Later, at home, I sorted through them again, and decided to keep only about a third of the ones I had brought home.<\/p>\n

All of the ones I brought home are currently in boxes in my garage; my new place doesn’t yet have enough bookcases for the ones I’m keeping, and I haven’t figured out what to do with the rest. I’ll probably ask the local library if they’ll take books with smoke-damaged covers for their book sale. I suspect they’ll say no, and I doubt the local used-book store will take them, which probably means throwing them out. Which I don’t want to do, which is why I’ve been putting off dealing with it for so long.<\/p>\n

There’s one small category of books that weren’t smoke-damaged: he had a bookcase full of science fiction paperbacks, and a fair number of those were wrapped in protective plastic bags. This was especially true for a bunch of the Philip K. Dick paperbacks. So there are several early-edition PKD paperbacks in very good condition mixed in with the rest of the books.<\/p>\n

I’ve tried to clean the soot off of the covers of a few of the ones I’m keeping, but it was a slow process, and I didn’t do very many of them, and wasn’t very successful with the ones I did work on.<\/p>\n

More answers to Dobe’s questions to follow in other entries and\/or comments in coming days\/weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an entry from late 2007, Dobe asked what happened to Peter’s books. I was going to finally post a comment on that entry to supply some answers just now, when I realized that I might as well make it a full entry instead of a comment. So here goes: Peter had a lot of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-peters-books"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}