An Accounting of Books

Total number of books irretrievably loaned/stolen from me: 13-16

Janet from work: Stole my book on American Sign Language which was a gift

Crazy Lady who borrowed 6 books from me and never returned them including my Stephen Crane short story Book, London's Call of the Wild, Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, Henry James' The American, and Drieser's Jeannie Gerhardt and The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton.

At least four other novels, mostly paperbacks which will be easy to replace.

Two software manuals and another how-to book, I believe all of which are in the posession of relatives.

Fran then declared my book-loaning judgement to be suspect, so I had to refuse to let a colleague borrow her Complete Works of William Shakespeare (one of the few books which was acquired prior to our marriage by either of us--it's Fran's). The colleague, who was holding her hands out expectantly, was shocked and kind of stood there blinking.

Alluding to this issue, for a few years this was one of the themes at Christmas--One year, Fran got me a very nice set of book plates to stick inside the cover of my books. The next year, she got me a imprinting seal, kind of like a notary stamp, with my name engraved on it--now I stamp all of my books with it almost immediately--even the $2 used paperbacks I get. At least they will know who the book is stolen from...

I currently have three books out with colleagues from my professional library. I'm nearly confident that I will not get one of them back due to a semantic problem. I was recommending a book on improving verbal communication and brought it in to work to loan. That was about a year ago. Now, I'm convinced that maybe I need to improve my verbal communication--I'm wondering if I need to buy that book and re-read it so I can communicate more clearly in the future whether something is a gift or a loan.


Books I have stolen: 3

1) Swiped a General Woodworking book from my now-defunct private middle school. Not sure if it was on purpose or accident, but I ended up with it--Found it in the attic the other day and flipped through it--pretty much the worst reference book on woodworking I've ever seen. How can woodworking be so boring?

2) Another textbook I ended up with is my second year Latin workbook. I know I didn't buy that--woo hoo! Let's get crazy! agricola, agricolae...

Actually, I did see my high school Latin teacher at Chili's last year. She was really cool. I remember that for some reason I accidentally said the "f-word" in front of her. She gasped melodramatically and said, very quietly, "You just said the worst word in the world!" Then she winked at me and went back to grading papers. It must not have affected her opinion of me much, because of something that happened toward the end of my senior year. She used to tell us a lot of personal stories, and had a good relationship with the kids in the class. Latin students at our school were a peculiar breed, because we really had to go out of our way to take Latin--there was only one teacher, and almost everyone takes Spanish since we are on the border with Mexico. All the cheerleaders took French, for some reason or another.

The Latin teacher had this freaky thing she could do--she was completely ambidextrous, but took it one step further--she could write an English word with one hand and write the Latin word below it with the other...

But the class was asking her personal questions one day and one of the girls asked her what kind of guys she used to date--to my horror at the time, she said, "Well, I would probably date a guy like Mike..." I think my face was red for a week.

3) The third book I stole is Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Slaughterhouse Five. It was the first anti-establishment novel I ever read, and I stole it from a classmate of mine who let me borrow in during our sophomore year in high school. If I ever see him again, I'll give it back to him. It's the only book in my shelves that I haven't stamped...