The remembrance of books past

 A few days ago someone emailed me out of the blue to say that they'd bought a science fiction paperback from a used book store and it had a sticker with my name on inside the cover.

Curious, they'd googled me, found my cv online, and from that my email address.

I was so amazed that I tooted about the email and emailed the person back to admit that it was indeed me.

The story as to how my name ended up on a book from the early eighties is quite simple.

Back then I used to read a lot of science fiction, and as I used to lend them to people, started putting stickers inside, just as I did my more technical books on botanical surveying and the like.

Anyway, long story short, around about the millennium we decided to move permanently to Australia.

Everything that we brought with us had to fit in a single twenty foot container, including our nearly new washing machine, our equally new Habitat furniture, etc etc.

Not everything would fit, so we only brought the technical and specialised books that would be difficult to replace plus a few sentimental favorites, and the rest went to charity.

I thought I must have given my science fiction books to charity, but I remember that I gave them to the university science fiction society.

Obviously at some point they must have given the books to charity.

Now, what struck me about this episode is that, in the same way that when I was documenting the contents of Lake View I would some times try and trace the previous owners of the books used to dress the house, or trace the addressees of nineteenth century postcards picked up from ebay.

It's a sort of sleuthing.

When I do some family history stuff I try and do much the same, rather than simply recording births, deaths marriages and other relationships I try and form a picture of the individual, what they did, where they lived and what sort of world they lived in.

And of course for people who lived loved and died in the latter half of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth, there are digitised records, digitised newspapers and the like to show the world they lived in, so for example in the case of Fanny Elizabeth Bull, a young governess who was assaulted in 1885 on an underground train in Brixton, you find that the authorities did take the case seriously, with the railway company providing a lawyer to support Miss Bull.

And women travelling on their own is a reflection of a changing society, in which even middle class young women  might have jobs and go out to work.

And out of this one can build a picture of how a society functioned and the impact changes, both in the availability of transport and women's increasing freedom...