Last night, after reading a chapter of the Christian self-help whitepaper book I’m reading, I thought I might want to read instead of another chapter of the book and instead of another short story in the collection I’m kind of slogging through (which I am reading because I’m taking a break in the middle of the the volumes of Shakespeare, C.S. Lewis, Will and Ariel Durant, and the other books stacking up on the chairside table).
So I headed into my office and found myself looking through the double-stacked collection of Classics Club editions that I have because maybe I wanted to read Thomas More or Horace as a quick in-betweener (or, more likely, I was just seeing what I had that aligned with entries in the Great Authors of the Western Reading Tradition lecture series I just completed.
And… I found another copy of The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope (which I just read after listening to the lecture on Pope) and A Tale of Two Cities which I just read last year.
I cannot put them on the library’s free book cart because the Dickens is part of the Walter J. Black Dickens collection (which look a lot like the Classics Club but the title background on the spine is green) and the Pope is part of the MacMillan’s Pocket American and English Classics series (which is different but similar to the Riverside Literature Series and the Maynard’s English-Classic Series). How many of them do I have in my collection? At least one.
But! Although I can log and move the Dickens to the read shelves without re-reading it (thankfully!), it looks like the Pope collection is not only “The Rape of the Lock”, “An Essay on Man”, and “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” but also several other shorter poems. So I cannot count this as read, but I shall put it onto my chairside table, knock off the shorter poems, and count it as a whole other book. Although not for the Summer Reading Challenge.
After discovering this, I enumerated for my beautiful wife all the known Pope editions we have in house: The three little pocket hardbacks, a large (old) hardback (covered in mylar in 2021), and a paperback copy with a museum mask on the front cover (around here somewhere).
Proving, once again, that Nogglestead’s library beats most branches of the Springfield-Greene County Library these days.
