Observation Note 95: Collecting the books of others. In May of this year, I responded to an FB notice from romance researcher Donna Maree Hanson offering her romance collection to interested romance researchers. I was fortunate enough for Donna to have said Yes to my response. However, due to the 3 month long Sydney lockdown, as well as some other logistical issues, it took many months to finally get the books to my home this weekend thanks to my lovely husband who was working interstate and was able to pick the books up on his way back home.

Donna refers to these books as The Grace Collection which I think is so apt and lovely as I feel that I have been graced with the care of over one thousand romance novels. Donna too had received many of these books from someone else, a reader who had been collecting them for many years. Donna has also added many of her own books to this collection and as the new owner, I am not able to differentiate between readers and owners. At least not yet. But there are lovely markings on these books that are so familiar to me; the books with second hand books shop price tags, with library discard stamps, with spots and dots and lines and circled page numbers, broken spines and unbroken spines signifying books bought and read, as well as books bought and left unread, a readerly quirk so many of us know deeply. I have already seen books from the early 1970s and a few from the late 2010s. I am interested to see if the collection is overwhelmingly 20th or 21st century category romance publications – Mills & Boon, Harlequins of all lines, Loveswept, Silhouettes and Candlelight Ecstasy. All up, the Grace Collection had 7 plastic crates/containers, 3 archive boxes and two plastic bags of books. From what I can see, there is no other paperwork that accompanies the books. I have already gone through every container. Storing these books will be another blog post altogether!

It is not the first time that I have taken on another person’s romance novel collection. Many years ago, Merrian Weymouth graced me with a large part of her collection, the majority of which still sits on my romance shelves. They are literally romance shelves as I bought them from the now long-gone Burwood Book Exchange. This fabulous second hand bookshop on the Burwood Road was nine parts romance fiction and one part all the other fictions – a cornucopia of romance fiction closing in on you as you walked down their aisles. I would travel there multiple times a year to swap out my books while searching for new ones. Like so many romance bookstores, Burwood Book Exchange closed down early in the 2010s. I didn’t know the owners well so I never found out if it was due to the massive shift in romance readers moving from print to ebooks or something else but their closure impacted my own access to new-to-me books. I returned nearly weekly in those closing weeks, buying books and books and more books, hoarding for those desolate years ahead of me (LOL I’m so dramatic) with a dearth of access points for second hand print books (a dearth that continues – woe is me). In the last days before the shop closed I asked about their shelves and I managed to secure two shelves which are in my study/sunroom and house a third of my romance collection. I merged Merrian’s collection with my own sizeable one, sending any doubles I found to other reader/collectors, paying Merrian’s kindness forward which is what I hope to do with doubles from The Grace collection. My long term goal is to find an academic library that wants this collection for their own repository and book researchers – lofty dreams as I aim high, an unemployed ideologist in this awful era of higher education decimation and the freefall of humanities and sociology faculties in universities across Australia. With over 40, 000 university staff having been stood down or made redundant since 2020, my aim is like a smidgeon of hope. A way to keep going forward. In the meantime, I am going to sort through the books that I do have and hopefully make sense of all my holdings.

Observation Note 96: Work should stay at work unless you aren’t working and you are keeping a pandemic at bay. I have always resisted the urge to catalogue my own books. There is embracing your profession, being a boffin to its practices or just letting every aspect of your work permeate you every hour. I chose to leave my work at work (something that some people no longer can do). As I don’t consider reading for pleasure to be a core skill for being a librarian (shock! horror! let’s discuss this later!), I happily keep a list of all my reading over at Goodreads (included as a widget on this blog) as I choose to not consider it to be work (bear with me as I have many contradictions). I’ve often balked at the thought of keeping records of what I own, wanting it to be my reading that is my focus rather than an inventory of materials to which I can apply my professional cataloguing skills. I like having a separation from my work practices, and I kinda like sorting my books by colour as it is such an amusing anathema to so many people, as though aesthetics are not part of book production and the reading experience.

So, in embracing my inner (former? out of work? not even looking for this type of work? call it what you will?) librarian and finally documenting my own books, I have also decided to not use any apps or library specific websites to store this information. I looked up some suggestions and just got too tired of reading all the T&Cs, and all the ways that my data was going to be mined as business intelligence. I feel all data-mined out. Instead I am going to use a simple spreadsheet saved on my computer not on any cloud and I will see how I go from there.

Meanwhile, enjoy some photos of The Grace Collection from when it arrived at my home.