Books, Books, Books

Amongst all the tidying, chucking out, cleaning, phoning charity shops, talking to the letting agent, contacting the gardener, getting the gas switched back on, and so on... I spent ages going through Mum's books. Hundreds of them, and all good stuff - mostly history of art and biography hardbacks, not so much fiction. She was very intreated in diaries (though sadly never kept one herself), particularly by women from the mid-20th Century, and many of the biographies were of women through the ages: wives or mistresses of kings, novelists (she loved Jane Austen), all sorts. 
It was such good quality and in such good condition that I quite wanted to keep 90% of it, but would I really get round to reading them all? Where would we put them? So in the end I saved a boxful and divided the rest between a decent second-hand bookshop and Oxfam. The bookshop got a pretty good deal I have to say, and the guy from Oxfam said it was best selection he'd seen in years. I was surprised to hear him say that he didn't get many job-lots like this - there are so many elderly people in the Chichester area that I thought they'd be inundated with books, but apparently not. He took away a load of crockery too.

The scary thing about all these books was that they represented the tip of the iceberg so to speak. Most of Mum's reading matter came from the library