Flashes of Panic

Yesterday morning I dropped off the last set of give-away books before moving. It was a bunch of books from my Russian library, some text-in-translation stuff and some actual Russian I brought back from my summer in Petersburg. I’m keeping quite a lot, but I’m also getting realistic about my odds of actually cracking some of these books ever again. Instead, I left them at the Russian department office to be put on the shelves of my one-time dorm, the Russian House.

The department secretary warned me, as I dropped them off, that books in the Russian House “tend to walk.” They were happy to get them, because the library shelves were apparently relatively bare, but I’m pretty sure some of the translations, at least, are assigned texts in some classes. They’re likely to be permanently adopted by students.

This is fine, in my view. I’d toyed with the idea of putting some kind of labels in them (“A gift from…”) but on further thought, decided that my goal here wasn’t to create some kind of bibliophilic self-memorial; my goal was to take the books off my shelves and put them in the hands of someone who could read them or otherwise make use of them.

I didn’t go so far as to create labels that read, “Steal this book!”