Old Books and a Gift

Anyone who's been to my house knows I love books. You can't help but figure that out after being here a while, say, long enough to wander through 2 or 3 rooms. And I really love old books; I enjoy the knowledge that there's a connection between me and whoever owned this book long ago.

So, our friend Greg stopped by on his way to Maryland yesterday; in the back seat of his car he had a box of books for us. The little boys were thrilled, because there were a number of books they will enjoy reading (and five that they urged me to send to one of their sisters, because they're "girly books"). Among the books was this geometry book, with a copyright date of 1916, renewed in 1924. I noticed a number of things about this book.

First, the book has some kind of oiled paper cover glued to it. Now WHY didn't schools continue doing that, instead of dooming generations of us to figuring out how to fold brown paper bags to make book covers that would tear soon anyway? This book was last used in the 1932 to 1933 school year, and its cover is still intact. Just saying.
The pages aren't so hot, but it's interesting to see that a kid a long time ago made the same kind of notes I would have made. Ryan was especially interested to find the charts of squares, square roots, etc. in the back of the book. He's learning Algebra this year, and probably didn't quite believe me that back in the days of the dinosaurs, we didn't have computers or graphing calculators or such things, and had to look up all of our functions in charts which existed in every book.

But what I found most interesting was that this boy had left a homework assignment typed on an index card in his book.
And he was clearly bored, because he'd made this sketch on the back of his assignment.

As I said, I love the connection between people of the past and present. I love to imagine what they were thinking.

On another note, last week I got a present from Chan. This week, it was finally warm enough to wear.

Isn't this shawl beautiful? I wore it to the lab to get blood drawn, and my dearly beloved was most perplexed that the ladies who work there were studying it carefully, feeling it and admiring it. One asked how she could get friends like mine who knit.

Don't mind the face I'm making in this picture. I was looking right into the sun, and my little guy isn't enough of a photographer to tell me I looked funny!
Hope you all have a lovely weekend. The boys and I are off to a Library used book sale. We do love those books!