Niche of Time: The Revenge of The Shadow Library

Sunday, August 28, 2022

The Revenge of The Shadow Library

Last night (or, to put it another way, early this morning), waking up and finding myself unable to sleep, I decided to move out the couple of very heavy trunks where I keep family memorabilia, in preparation to giving them a good going over at last. After I finally struggled them over to the couch, I opened the trunks to cast a prefatory eye over the contents before trying to go to bed again.

After looking at some blank notebooks and ancient report cards and so forth, I ran across another one of those little diaries which I kept buying once upon a time. I thought to myself, “Hullo! What’s this?”, because I thought that I had all my journals in my other files. Opening it, I found myself looking at the beginning of yet another Book List! Dating from the very early 1980’s (my college years) and stopping just at the early “C”’s, I began to scan its inky, cursive pages.

Imagine my surprise at discovering a whole TWENTY-FOUR forgotten volumes for the Shadow Library in such a little span! And once their titles had been brought to my memory, I recognized them all (with the possible exception of the Bierce; I must not have had it very long). I immediately began compulsively tracking down covers and making a list.

Seeing them brings back very visceral and vivid recollections of what that period was like. It was very much my “searching” and even “pretentious” time, while I was looking at everything and trying to figure out what I would be, as all the classical, religious, and philosophical works indicate – most of which, I must honestly state, I never got very far with.

Of course, the incomplete catalog begs the burning question: what other books might there have been in the unrecorded D-Z that I have since forgotten, as I forgot these twenty-four? I shall probably never know, but, though the question tantalizes me, I must also ask myself: can it really be of any great importance?