Ecclesiastes 12:12

Packing up to leave my office at last: the library downstairs keeps a “giveaway cart” where people can dump their unwanted books as strays seeking adoption on their last stop before the pound. Lately I’ve been culling my office to see what I keep and what goes to the cart. It’s a draining exercise. Don’t listen to what Mrs. B tells you, I am really not a pack rat—I’m sure in my life time I have thrown away 2-3 times as many books as I now own. But this kind of exercise is like ripping off the husks of former selves.

Some of these show their age. Perhaps the one I've owned longest is an old Bantam Paperback of The Count of Monte Cristo. The inside cover indicates I bought it in Washington Courthouse, Ohio, in 1957. I remember reading it while tending a coal furnace when my kids were babies in the 1960s (I don’t think I realized it was abridged). And here’s an ancient copy of of Bertram D. Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution, just about the first serious grownup book I ever read I (hey, I was a late starter, okay?) with a printing date of 1959.

Moving forward in time, here’s a paperback of Perry Miller’s collection, The Legal Mind in America (1962). I see that I bought it in February, 1963, which would have been just months before I began law school: I wonder, did I think it would help? From law school itself, I keep my old copy of Casner and Leach on Real Property, the most instructive casebook I ever went to school to. From law school also, here’s the two volume mimeo (sic) of Hart and Sachs, The Legal Process, which circulated in Samizdat for a generation before somebody got around to publishing it. Oh, and here is the three-volume set of Corpus Juris Secundum on Corporations: my first law school prize (we used it as a booster chair to get my daughter up to the dinner table).

And at last, a milestone: a four-volume set of Kent’s Commentaries, (9^th ed., 1858), given me by my Aunt Selma when I passed the bar in 1968 (she was a legal secretary back before smart girls went to law school). I suspect I have never opened it, but it sure does look pretty.

From the beginning of my own teaching career, here’s Kessler & Gilmore Contracts (1970), one of the classics of law-teaching, together with Gilmore’s inimitable teaching notes, which passed hand to hand among professors in the old days like some underground Henry Miller. More recently, here’s a lot of stuff that (aside from its value as compost) is entirely worthless: bankruptcy statutes of 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, etc., previous editions of lawyer desk books, some written (gasp!) by me.

There are other items not so neatly dateable. Here’s a whole run of books that had certain cachet in their time, now mostly forgotten: Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic; Ed Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society; Leon Festinger et al., When Prophecy Fails; J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors--but just where should I rank Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques? (together with Lévi-Strauss, I do find a Fontana Modern Masters paperback, purporting to explain just what in hell he was talking about).

And there are any number of books I won’t throw away but I suspect I may never read, starting with Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus.

There are scattered fragments of various languages I have never learned very well. Ignoring the audio tapes, here’s a student edition of Pinocchio, which helped me idle away a day when I got stuck in a snowstorm in South Carolina (long story)—complete with student questions: “chi viene in aiuto di Pinocchio?” Here’s a nice antique edition of Balzac’s Le Lys Dans La Vallée, given me a thousand years by a student for my presiding over her wedding; the marriage did not last, but the book is still here (indeed, there seems to be a lot of Balzac; I did not realize I was such a fan). And looky looky: an Oxford classical edition of Plato’s Republic, in Greek (but why do they insist on putting the titles in Latin?)—I guess was full of optimism about my retirement agenda.

And there’s more, folks: there seems to be an array of poets I had quite forgotten I still owned (which probably tells you something): Edwin Muir (once a great favorite); Robert Lowell, James Merrill. And here’s a tattered old edition of Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels (but I bought it second hand just last year); and here’s Iona and Peter Opie’s Lore and Language of School Children, which I discovered many years ago(but this is a new copy, also purchased just last year).

I learn that I must be a sucker for dictionaries. Here is a Dictionary of Espionage. Here is Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure and Preposterous Words (knibber: a male deer when the antlers first appear). Oh, and here is the three volume set of the Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance which I bought for $100 from a colleague when, I suspect, he needed the money. As a pendant, here is Hawkshop:The Fabulous Story of the “Emperor of Pawnbroking.”

Finance and Pawnbroking come from a more recent phase in my life, when I got interested in learning (and teaching) the basics of finance to law students. Here are some of the MBA textbooks I cribbed from so shamelessly, before writing my own. Here’s Forgotten Calculus and Forgotten Algebra, which saved my bacon more than once. Here’s a (once) pretty good one about accounting fiddles, made obsolete by the exponential growth of financial fraud in the decade of Enron.

There are tough judgment calls in this game. I suppose I do need my two-volume Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, and Dicey on the Constitution, but do I really need volumes of political criticism written by a couple of Yale professors 15 or 20 years ago, perhaps long forgotten already even by the authors? And here is de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution; I have a French edition at home; do I trust my French enough to dispense with the English? And do I keep my edition of the script of Repo Man—for use, of course, in the teaching of commercial law?

And so it goes. I have 15 boxes of the stuff so far, with maybe another ten still to go (but I swear, I am not a pack rat). And this says nothing about the stuff I discarded. Which reminds me,—that library remainder cart: a month ago, I found my old copy of Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America. I remember the day when everybody in the library seemed to have his (sic) own copy. Last month I put mine on the remainder cart. Tonight, it's still there.