Thanks for that lovely reminiscence. One of the things that crosses my mind from time to time is what my pretty vast Library (the book part is uppermost in my mind, but digital real estate like /music, video, pdfs, etc etc/ is also something to consider) is good for in the longer run, once I'm no longer in a position to consult and maintain it/them. Some parts of it seem like they could support somebody else's lifelong learning, like the History of Technology subsection, and the Music ditto, the vast Photography holdings, and quite a number of others that could be defined as subsections. Kian is who I think of... but by the time he's old enough to be interested, will anybody even want codex books, or have places to keep them? I have a sort of a shelflist of my parents' library, compiled by Eunice and Alice I think, and most of what's in the list is now really vieux jeu, though for them and their purposes it was a wide-ranging collection (dominated by Swedenborg stuff, of course) and supported their bookly habits... but hardly anything in the shelflist would interest me, if I had the actual books. And I had the offer of any books I wanted from Alice and Wick's shelves, but mostly they were not tempting. Perhaps other people's libraries are sort of like their old underwear and socks: one COULD adopt them and give them new life by wearing them, but it would be pretty bizarre... This all comes up as I reorganize the shelves in the Auxiliary Library in the barn, in the process discovering many threads of past enthusiasms and marshalling others into new subject-area coherence... for example, a whole heap of books that have to do more or less with Landscape/Geography, which seen as a Collection reflects a lot of work I've done over the years. I'm attempting to develop a Narration of what it all means, what the various arms of my lifelong biblio enterprise betoken, a pretty vast project but very constructive to work at.

Any sage advice?