All posts by David Todd

Book Review: The Darwin Conspiracy

July 21, 2023 David Todd 2 Comments

This is a novel that might appeal to some. The writing is good, but the plot suffers from needless complexity and, dare I say, some goofiness.

I’m not sure where we got it, but The Darwin Conspiracy by James Scott Bell has been in our house for a long time. I’ve been in writers conferences where Bell has been the keynote speaker or taught workshops, so I definitely wanted to read it.

It’s a novel, Bell’s first published novel, written in the 1990s when he was trying to transition from lawyer to writer. The plot is rather strange. It goes back and forth between the present day and times in the 19th century. Keeping them straight was difficult at first, easier at the end of the novel.

The premise is a document, called the Busby Manuscript. Sir Max Busby was the assumed name of a man who, as a boy, hated his father and killed him. He took on the name Max Busby and went to sea to avoid the law. The ship he sailed on was The Beagle, the same vessel on the same voyage that carried Charles Dawin on his famous round-the-world trip during which Darwin did the bulk of his formative research.

Busby sensed that the evolutionary theories that Dawin was just starting to develop would be disastrous to Christianity. Being an evil man, Busby wanted science to thrive and Christianity to suffer, and so egged Darwin on. As the story develops, Busby posed as an educated man (which he was not) and was with Darwin at every critical stage in Darwin’s work. Then he was with Darwin’s friends and every person who eventually touted the cause of evolution, right up to the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. Busby interacts with all the famous scientists and others who had a hand in either pushing evolution forward or fighting against it.

In order to accomplish this, Bell had to have Busby live to the age of 125+ years old. Not believable in the slightest, even in a novel where it is assumed you will suspend unbelief.

The book was complicated by 1) constant switching from present to 2) Busby writing his narrative in 1927 to 3) his days with Darwin and Darwin’s successors, a period of 90 years. Keeping these times frames straight was difficult, especially because often two were mixed in one chapter.

The novel was also complicated because Bell puts himself in it. He was the one who was given the Busby narrative by an old professor, only to lose it when the professor is killed, the police confiscate the narrative, and someone steals it from them. This whole scenario was, quite frankly, ridiculous. Having Geraldo Rivira make a cameo appearance was way over the top.

I rate this book just 3-stars. It would be two for the plot, but the writing is quite good and that pulls it up. But it is not a keeper. I don’t anticipate ever reading it again, nor recommending it to anyone else.

family, Genealogy, miscellaneous

Progress on My Genealogy Project

July 17, 2023 David Todd Leave a comment

The closet shelf now has enough free space for some of my inventory for my books for sale.

I’ve written before about various special projects I’ve undertaken in the last two years of so. The sale of my 1900 encyclopedia set. The donation of the Stars and Stripes. The transfer of my grandfather’s trunk to a cousin. A collection of letters between a friend and me. The church Centennial book. A special project of some sort always seems to be in the mix of normal work.

Some of those special projects relate to disaccumulation in anticipation of a future downsizing. No date is set, but we know it’s coming. A couple of years ago I looked at the shelf of genealogy notebooks on a shelf in my closet and knew I had to do something about them.

I seriously doubt that my family members will be interested in it. Never say never, of course. I wasn’t interested in my genealogy until I was 46. So children or grandchildren might still show some interest. But as of now, none. When I’m gone, what’s going to happen to them? The trash can, I imagine. I really don’t want to leave them to my heirs to have to clean up, and I doubt I would have room for them in a smaller place.

These are about half the notebooks that I’ve been able to declare surplus.

I thought of donating them to some research library. But there are two problems with that. First, since I have been researching all family lines, both mine and my wife’s, and since we grew up in very different places and circumstances, the files would have to be split in two or more places.

But the really big reason why I can’t simply donate them is that they are atrociously unfinished. I started many sheets on many ancestors and never finished them. My documentation of facts I’ve accumulated ranges from excessive to non-existent. I would have to put a lot of work into bringing my files to a much higher level of completion than they are now before I could even think about donating them.

So I went through the notebooks, one by one, to see what I could cull from each. Page by page, I made a keep-discard decision. Some were easy but many were not. I got rid of enough pages to eliminate maybe a notebook or two, maybe even three.

Finally, early this year, I decided what I needed to do was digitize my files and throw most of the papers away. That, at first, proved to be a difficult process. How should I file them, and where? Do I file by family name first and generation second, or generation first and family second? I had already put in place a system for filing genealogy papers, which included a way of numbering ancestors.

But I found the system I started using wasn’t working. The system I needed had to be “retrievable”—that is, if I ever get back to active genealogy research I need to be able to find on the computer the files I digitized. That took some thinking and trials, but I finally got it. I would number each person first by their Ahnentafel number. I won’t explain that. It’s easily findable if you’re interested. Then I would include their generation number. My method for numbering generations is to designate my children to be Generation 100, and count backwards and forwards from there. I’m generation 99, my parents are generation 98, etc.

I decided to save everything to Microsoft OneDrive. If that ever goes away, or if they have a data failure, I could lose everything. That’s a risk I’m willing to take so as to reduce the amount of paper I have.

I began this project in earnest sometime earlier this year. Working notebook by notebook, page by page, I look at each page to see, with a more critical eye than I did before, if it’s a sheet that I want to keep, or if it’s so unfinished or preliminary or far in antiquity that it’s better just to discard it. My goal is to discard 10 sheets a day, either by scanning and discard or by immediate discard.

Ten sheets a day doesn’t sound like much, but over a year that would be 3,650 sheets if I did this every day. That’s over seven reams of paper in a year. That will put a serious dent in that shelf of notebooks in the closet. And while 10 sheets is the goal, my unofficial goal is 20 sheets. that would be approaching 15 reams of paper.

It’s actually kind of burdensome. Making the keep-discard decision, doing the scanning, figuring out the right place to save the scanned file and the right name to give it. After ten pages, I’m somewhat brain weary. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, since “getting things done” normally energizes me. I do feel energized when I work on the project, but it also wearies me.

I’d say I’m averaging 15 pages a day, discarded directly or after scanning and e-filing. That may not be fast enough to do what I want to do, but it’s the best I can do unless I stop all other things that make life interesting.

I’ll check back in and report more about this project in another month. Maybe I’ll have reduced my paper files by another couple of notebooks.

book reviews, Carlyle

Book Review: Mr. Froude and Carlyle

July 14, 2023 David Todd Leave a comment

This book claims Froude did a poor job on the bio he wrote of Carlyle, but could Froude be right and Wilson wrong?

I have been reading more and more and more books on my phone lately (my Nook having reached obsolescence a year ago). I’m always reading a print book, or two, but I enjoy the convenience of having the e-books available wherever I am.

One of these books I finished in May. Mr. Froude and Carlyle, by David Wilson. Published in 1898, seventeen years after Carlyle’s death, the book appears to have been written to counter the four-volume biography of Caryle that James Anthony Froude had written and published in the mid-1880s.

It seems that Froude, at least in Wilson’s mind, had been very hard on Carlyle. But that was only in relation to Carlyle’s wife, Jane. It seems that Wilson thought that Jane could do no wrong and Thomas no right whenever there was a dispute between them. Wilson didn’t like that. He took up each of those disputes and re-cast it as favorable to Thomas and negative to Jane.

I have not yet read Froude’s four-volume work. After having read Wilson’s book, I started on Froude’s but haven’t read very far into it yet. That Froude’s biography of Carlyle would be inaccurate is puzzling, since it was an authorized bio and Froude had access to all of both Thomas’s and Jane’s papers.

I found the book a bit comical. Wilson wrote it in a format something like this:

Froude wrote about this incident in 1848, indicating how Thomas treated Jane shabbily.
But I, Wilson, have looked into that incident and in fact it was Jane who was in the wrong.
How could Froude have been so far off the mark? He must have wanted to run Thomas down.
Oh, and Froude regularly redacted critical information from letters or journals. Shame on him.

I’m anxious to get further into Foude’s book to see if it’s as lopsided against Thomas as Wilson said. I began that book at Volume 3, because all of Wilson’s examples were in that time period or later. For the 60 pages I’ve read in it, I can find no fault.

This book by Wilson is something that would be of interest only to Carlyle scholars and amateur scholars, like me. It’s certainly not worth picking up and reading for anyone else.

book reviews

Book Review: Life and Letters of Charles Darwin

July 10, 2023 David Todd Leave a comment

Around twenty years ago, maybe a little longer, I discovered Project Gutenberg. Back in those dark ages, pre-Kindle, no one had yet manufactured and marketed a reliable and functional e-book reader. Creating digital copies of books back then was done using OCR scanning or, heaven forbid, retyping from print copies. But it worked. PG had, by the time I discovered it, a large library of digitized books. A whole library on your computer, at your fingertips! I was in heaven.

I downloaded a number of books in rich text format (Word format not being an option). One of those was The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 1. I loaded the RTF into Word and formatted it for compact printing but comfortable reading—a nice blend. I never printed it, however, not knowing when I might read it. In the last year I discovered a Kindle feature where you can upload any text file to your Kindle device. I tried that with several files, including this one.

A controversial figure to many, but certainly something worth knowing more about.

I wanted to read this because I’ve already read a fair amount about or by Darwin. I read Origin of Species about three years ago (reviewed on this blog). And many years ago I read Irving Stone’s The Origins. Plus I’ve read several other articles about him. So in May sometime, having finished other reading projects, I pulled this up on my phone’s Kindle app and began reading it. I set it down several times, finally getting into a rhythm of reading a good number of pages. I finished it about two weeks ago.

It’s a good book. Not stellar, but good. It was compiled by Darwin’s son, Francis Darwin. Volume 1 covers up to and including publishing The Origin of Species, but not his life afterwards. The book is more biography than it is letters. That was a downer, as I was looking forward more to letters than to biography. The bio portion was a little bit lackluster. Francis Darwin arranged this topically rather than chronologically. I generally prefer chronological biographies. So I found the biography portion generally uninteresting.

The letters were also arranged a little bit topically, though with a nod to chronology. The letters written from The Beagle, the boat Darwin sailed on his famous voyage around the world, were quite interesting. As were the letters in the years following that voyage.

The letters in the two decades between the voyage and publishing Darwin’s famous book were mostly good. Many included the scientific names of species Darwin was studying. Those were somewhat hard to read, but interesting if you could skim past all the names. All together, they told a story of a man who was sick most of his life, but still managed to get a fair amount of work done and publish things that the scientific community embraced, followed by the rest of the world.

This is a book I’m glad I read, but probably will never read again. I don’t remember if I downloaded and formatted Vol 2, but I’m not going to go looking for it right away on my computer. As for Vol 1, I give it 3 1/2 stars, marked down for the biology section, with the letters section not stellar enough to pull the whole book up to the 4-stars category.

Documenting America, self-publishing, The Forest Throne, Writing

Dreams of a Writer

July 7, 2023 David Todd 1 Comment

I had thought my children’s time travel books might spur sales, but, alas, not so.

After having taken the month of June off from writing—except you can’t fully take that long of a time off from writing—what you do is back off of new writing and pretty much maintain things like the blog and promotion—I’m now back at it, working on a new book in my Documenting America series.

It felt a little weird at first, to come down to The Dungeon in the morning and do things other than writing. But my routines, interrupted for a mere 30 days, have quickly re-established themselves. I have a goal as to where I want to be at the end of July, and I think that I’m either on pace of maybe even a little ahead of where I want to be.

I haven’t yet promoted the sequel. I know I should, but it just seems meaningless to do so.

That gets the long-suppressed dreams of a writer going in my mind. As I work on a new project, other projects come to mind. Even as I plod along toward daily goals, and book sales trickle in at Amazon (10 in June, so far 3 in July, plus one personal sale), other new projects come to mind. Specifically, things I could write and publish serially on Kindle Vella. Four non-fiction series are rolling around, taking up brain space that should be going to the new book. Well, one of those projects is related to the Documenting America book.

The other three potential Vella projects are pie-in-the-sky stuff, things that are more dreams than real projects. Things that would spur sales and generate a little income, get my name a little more wide-spread. Things that would take up time.

And that’s the problem. Do I want to hop over to Vella series from books? That makes no sense. I have no idea how well Vella series sell. Most that are there seem to be fiction, and my ideas are non-fiction. Last month I browsed the non-fiction titles there, and could draw no conclusions. Would my non-fiction series gain an audience there, or not?

In my dreams, they would, and not just a small audience, but a fantastic, large, and ever-expanding audience, waiting for the next in each series, almost begging for more. I won’t share the dreams of how many dollars those series would bring in, because if I did, someone would say it’s time for an intervention, to bring me back to earth.

Such are the dreams of the writer. Working on one project while dreaming of four others while watching anemic sales show up in the Amazon sales report while wondering how to better self-promote. I suspect I’m not alone in that.

Time to move on to the next daily task on the new book. Push the dreams into the background for a couple of hours, and see what I can get done.

Bible study, Christianity, Documenting America, Screwtape's Good Advice, self-publishing, Writing

Too Many Things To Write

July 3, 2023 David Todd Leave a comment

So, the day after posting my writing goals for July, I started to have second thoughts.

In that post, I said my main project would be the next Documenting America series, Run-Up To Revolution. I started working on it yesterday, creating the Table of Contents and cataloging the source items already in the Word document. I turns out I only have five more documents to either find and copy or type. That’s a good start.

But is it the right thing to write? The last couple of days I did some more looking into Kindle Vella. For those who don’t know, that’s an Amazon platform for stories/books brought out in serial form. I thought maybe I could publish my nascent memoir, Tales Of A Vagabond, there. I have five “episodes” as K-V calls them) written, and a little inspiration caused me to start planning the broader book.

But wait, because that new Bible study I mentioned in a previous post continues to pull at me. I did a little research reading for it yesterday in the second source document, and a proposed outline has started to come together in my mind. Nothing is on paper yet.

But it also occurred to me that maybe I should return to working on the eight-part Bible study A Walk Though Holy Week. I’ve written about that before. Parts 4, 5, 6, and 7 are written, and Parts 4, 5, and 6 have had one editorial pass. These four could be ready to publish in a couple of months, Parts 1, 2, and 3 are fully planned, and Part 8 partially planned. It occurred to me that maybe I should shift to writing Part 1, for I don’t know if it makes sense to begin publishing the series at Part 4. What to do, what to do?

Then, our adult Sunday School class has begun re-studying C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. We went through it around 2008, and I wrote four chapters covering four letters. I found them useful in teaching fifteen years later, and I feel the itch to work again on it again. But, that would be quite time consuming and energy sapping. What to do?

And that’s not all. A couple of months ago, finding myself at the time of our critique group and me with nothing to share, I dashed off the first four pages of the first book in my long-planned-but-never-started Alfred Cottage Mysteries. The crit group seemed to like it, as they had liked the series summary I had shared earlier. I’ve wanted to write that series for a long time but have hesitated since it would be yet another genre—something I don’t really need.

And one other thing occurred to me. Perhaps it’s time to get going transcribing the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia, as I did with the letters from our years in Kuwait. I want to get to that while I still have strength of mind and body. That’s not a commercial project; it would be only for family. But it’s important to me to see it done. I think, among all these things I’ve mentioned, it is the least likely to pop up to the surface at this time.

With all that, I actually have one or two other ideas floating around in my head, things that have come to me recently that haven’t gelled sufficiently to think of a title, an outline, or a purpose and scope. But they are there, consuming brain cells, and interrupting my reading on more immediately pressing projects.

Ah, the life of the writer with Genre Focus Disorder, too much immediate time, and too few years left in an already fruitful life to write everything that sits a while in my mind, never mind those ideas that flit through.

Bible study, Documenting America, goals, reading, The Forest Throne, Writing

June Progress, July Goals

June 30, 2023 David Todd Leave a comment

How can I possibly have progress in a month that I was taking off from writing? Well, taking time off for me is different than for others. It’s hard for me not to keep up with writing even during my month off. So I got a few things done. I’ll list them along with the goals, then I’ll see what kind of goals I can set for July.

Blog twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, as always. Even with grandparent busyness, I was able to get this done. Each day had a real blog post written and posted.
Attend writer groups meetings as I can based on travel schedule. As expected, travel kept be away from all but one of the scheduled meetings.
Proofread as much as I can of the four completed volumes of A Walk Through Holy Week. I proofread parts 4, 5, and 6 (which I didn’t remember proofreading last year). Part 7 will be a July goal.
Work on the cover for the AWTHW series. I don’t sell enough books to pay for cover creation, so I just have to do it myself. I have a concept I want to use, if I can do the graphics. Which leads to my last goal… This is done, sort of. I worked with my 10-year-old granddaughter, who shows some artistic talent, to go from my preliminary concept to a working prototype. Whether it’s a fully workable prototype, I’m not sure.
Work with G.I.M.P. on how to do more artistry in covers. I’ll have to find some tutorials.

Other things I got done were:

Catching up on correspondence, both new writing and filing all unfiled correspondence for 2023.
Publish The Key To Time Travel. I didn’t mention this as a June goal because I wasn’t sure of the timing for getting the cover. After dealing with some health issues, the cover designer finished her work, and the book went on sale this month.
Work on the source material for the next Documenting America book. See the July goals.
Do more reading than normal.
Brainstorm an idea for a new Bible study, and read some source material for it.
Made a few updates to my website—not major ones, but things that needed doing.
And one thing that wasn’t writing related, but which I feel like mentioning, was digitizing my genealogy files. No, they are not done—far from it. But I added to what I did in prior months and fine-tuned my filing system as I went along. At the end of the month I felt good about how much of this I accomplished.

Now, for some July goals.

Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
Attend two writers meetings, one of which I’ll present at. A third meeting may happen and I’ll attend, if the library can schedule them.
Work on Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution. Last month, even thought it wasn’t on the schedule, I managed to copy most of my source documents and load them into a Word document. The next step is reading and condensing them to the right length for the format of the series. I anticipate this will take all of July and possibly even longer.
Write up my recent Bible study idea into a proper outline of what it would be.

That’s a good number of goals for a month after a break. Documenting America will be my main task for the month.

home improvements, miscellaneous, reading

The Tree Came Down

June 26, 2023 David Todd Leave a comment

Here’s the view of the newly fallen tree, as it looks from my reading chair in the woods, off in the distance.

Summer is upon us in northwest Arkansas, both by the calendar and the weather. But our temperatures are hovering just below 90°F, or even in the upper 80s, for the daytime highs. Nightly lows are still in the 60s. That won’t last long. A forecast for next week shows us hitting 100 towards the end of the week.

But, I find it is cool enough to go to the sunroom and read around noon. That won’t last long either. My alternative place to read is a spot on our wood lot just south of the house. The lot is sloping, and finding a level spot to set a chair is a challenge. Last year I tried it but had a bad spot. Sitting wasn’t comfortable.

A little bit of enlargement. You can see how it’s at about a 45% angle. I haven’t walked down there yet to see what’s holding it up.

This year I chose another spot, just off the path to my compost pile. It’s not deep in the woods. In fact, when the sun comes around to due south and then a little to the west of south, the canopy of leaves becomes imperfect and it gets kind of hot. But, before 12:30 PM, when the sun is in the right spot and the shade is full, it’s quite pleasant there, even with the ambient temperature above 90.

The problem is, I find sitting in the woods distracting. I come out through the garage, walk the 40 or 50 feet down the path, put my coffee and book on the log I’m using as a table, set out my chair, and have a seat. I open whatever book I’m reading (currently C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms), and read.

Except, I find it impossible to concentrate for long. I’m constantly looking up to see what is in the woods. Or to listen to whatever sound is about. Our street is little traveled and so doesn’t give off much noise. If a strong enough breeze is going, I can hear the trees swaying and rustling through the leaves. I don’t hear many critter sounds. Sometimes a squirrel will be dashing here or there perhaps a hundred feet from me. I will watch it for a while. A bird or two may fly through the woods, but birds I hear more than see.

I will take that walk down the hill soon. But I don’t think I’ll do much about it.

Anyhow, one day last week, I interrupted my reading to look into the woods. Off to the right and quite a way down the hill, but still on our lot (or just a few feet south of it), was a tree that was newly leaning, closer to horizontal than vertical. I knew this tree. It was one of three trees in the area where I had established a brush pile and a log pile. The trees were dead, but standing. One of these trees, about 6-inch diameter, had come down over the winter. I’ve slowly been cutting it to movable lengths and taking them down to the log pile.

This new one is at least 12-inches diameter. It sits, as I said, a few feet south of our lot line, but is falling in the direction of our lot. I can’t leave it how it is. In North Carolina they called this type of tree a “widow-maker”. So this will be another one I’ll have to clean up.

A 12-inch tree is too big to try to cut without a chainsaw, so maybe I can get a friend to come with his chainsaw and help me out. I want to keep the lot clean for when the grandkids come, so they can play on it without a lot of stuff to trip over. But that will have to wait until after blackberry season, which is now in full swing.

What’s the point of all this? The difficulty of concentrating, which might be a sign of aging? Enjoyable things seen in the woods? The extra work that an extra lot puts on you? I suppose any of those could be a subject to expand.

I was thinking, though, of how using our senses results in expanded observations. When did that tree come down? We had a windstorm, with a little rain, over Saturday-Sunday night. That might have been it. But, it could have come down sometime before that. I’ve been sitting in the woods off and on for about a month, and I don’t remember seeing it before. Had I not seen it, or was it a new casualty of the forces of nature?

I’m not sure how much we use all our senses. Sight. Hearting. Touch. Taste. Smell. Rarely, I think, do I take a moment to observe around us and evaluate the area with all five senses.

I’m trying to do a better job with this. Right now, Friday evening, I’m sitting in the living room. The TV is on in the background, providing sound. It has to compete with ringing in my ears, however. The sight factor is easy, and I won’t describe to you the combination of furniture, clutter, carpet, etc. that I see. No particular smell stands out from whatever the background smell is. I’m sipping cold water, which has a neutral but somewhat enjoyable taste.

As to touch, I’m in the recliner, laptop on my lap. The chair presses in on me, causing some pain in my slowly-recuperating left shoulder. It reminds me that I don’t much like this chair; something about the height of the arms and the way they press in. The “pillow” behind my head also is a bit too big.

Ah, using the senses. Time to get up and find something to exercise more fully my sense of taste. Peanut butter and jelly, perhaps? Or maybe half a grapefruit.

book reviews, Writing

Book Review: Eats, Shoots and Leaves

June 23, 2023 David Todd Leave a comment

I’m not sure where I picked up this little volume, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss. I think I won it at a writers conference. It’s a small hardback, 209 pages. What’s it about?

Punctuation.

The title comes from a punctuation error, though the author didn’t tell exactly where it happened. The writer, writing about panda bears, meant to write, “The panda eats shoots and leaves.” Alas, a pesky comma crept in, and it was printed “Eats, shoots and leaves.” The difference in meaning is startling, all from a misplaced comma.

Truss tells of several books on punctuation, going back to the 1700s. She shows how acceptable punctuation came into use through what worked and what didn’t. Punctuation was for the purpose of giving readers clues as to when to take a breath, when to fully stop. It’s a British book, so deals mostly with the British way of punctuating. Truss does talk about the differences on the two side of the pond.

It’s a good book. Truss manages to make a boring subject quite entertaining. If you are a writer and need to get a better handle on punctuation, this should be helpful. It wasn’t so much for me. I can’t say that I learned much in it, other than something about how punctuation has changed through the years.

I give this 4-stars. It’s not a keeper, however. I’m either going to give it to someone at one of my writers groups, or put it in the donation pile.

books, family, home improvements

One More Big Hole

June 19, 2023 David Todd Leave a comment

Here’s where they sat for over 20 years.

As I’ve posted before, my wife and I are slowly in the process of shedding possessions accumulated over the first 44 years of marriage. You would think that with the moves we made we would be lean in terms of stuff, but, alas, not so. When we went overseas our company paid to store our stuff so we didn’t have to get rid of anything. Now, being septuagenarians and knowing we will someday have to downsize, each possession is getting scrutiny. Does it bring us joy? Will we ever use it? Will we want to move it to whatever our next place is?

I’ve written before about some dis-accumulation we’ve done. Here’s a summary.

Dad’s tools. When Dad died in 1997, my brother and I split his tools between us, while my brother took all the hardware. My share, except for a very few I found uses for, sat in garages, unused, catching dust. It was in 2020 that I realized, “Do I really need six saws and eight planes?” Facebook Marketplace was my friend then, and I sold everything I didn’t see myself ever using.
They aren’t elegant to look at, but are obviously old. People like that.

Mom’s books. In the 1930s and 40s, Mom accumulated books, some of them through book-of-the-month clubs, some through one-off purchases. Most of them were commonplace books with no sentimental value. Except they were Mom’s. I came to realize I never would read them, couldn’t keep them forever, and sold off about 800 of them. The last 120 or so went to thrift stores, with a couple figuratively stained by my tears.
And the “innards” aren’t splashy the way encyclopedias became—before they migrated to the internet.

Dad’s Stars and Stripes. I’ve written about them before here and here, so I won’t go into it much. They are now in residence at the University of Rhode Island Library’s special collections, most likely in the inventory/curation process, waiting for scholars to pour over them.
Grandpa’s trunk. I also wrote about that not so long ago. The trunk Grandpa Oscar Todd brought with him when he emigrated from England to the USA is now at the home of a cousin, and much appreciated there.

So, what’s the new “hole” in our house, left from dis-accumulation?

Uncle Dave’s encyclopedias. These are a very nice, gently worn, 1900 set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. As our son urged us to do even more in anticipation of future downsizing, I listed them on Facebook Marketplace for a pretty good price. I had no action on them for a few weeks, then someone made an offer while we were out of town; I countered; a bargain was struck; and the transfer of money and books and bookcase happened on Saturday. The hole is in our entryway, which serves as an antique room.

A close-up of the covers. How they did encyclopedias in 1900.

The encyclopedias sat for many years (1950 to 1997) in the basement of the house I grew up in in Cranston, Rhode Island. Covered by a bedsheet, I found them one time in my teenage years, and had occasion to use them only once, in 1990 while visiting Dad. He said they were mine when he “croaked”.

I’m pretty sure they belonged to David Sexton, my grandmother’s uncle and the man I’m named after. He took my grandmother in when she was a single mother in a strange country and became a surrogate dad to my mom—or maybe a surrogate grandfather. He emigrated to the USA in 1887 and made his way to Providence in 1903. I suspect he bought the encyclopedias around the time of his arrival in Rhode Island.

A typical title page. Again, not splashy. Only a hole now because they belonged to Uncle Dave.

Our house here had the perfect place to display them. They took up little space and made a nice decoration for anyone entering the house. But are they something I would keep forever? I wish I could. When our son was here in January, he encouraged more dis-accumulation. My wife and I were at an impasse as to what to get rid of next, and as a result I decided these antique books would be next.

So they are gone. Even the bookcase, which was an antique of the same era, is gone. After confirming the sale, I wound up getting a full-price offer from another buyer. But, having made the bargain with the first buyer, I felt it had to go to them.

What more can I say? There is a hole in the entryway where they stood, and a little bit of a hole in my heart. But I have many other legacy books that belonged to Uncle Dave. Someday they will go the way of all earthly possessions, but not just yet.

David A Todd