Hidden Treasures in Plain View

 

My brother now lives in our old family house as my parents have moved to a senior living apartment.  When I visit Spokane, I stay in the house in what was once my bedroom, but is now a room for storing junk and other useless items.  The only items of interest are the shelves of books along one wall that have been left unread for years collecting dust.

During this visit I poked through the neglected stacks of books, something I hadn't done in years. Strangely enough I found a couple books of profound interest. 

In the first picture, you see an autographed copy of The Remains of Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.  I hadn't seen that book in decades and I thought it had disappeared or been tossed out.  It turns out the spine of the book was simply facing the wall so a person couldn't see the title. I had given it to my mother as a gift long ago, just as Ishiguro was establishing himself as a writer--this particular novel is definitely his most famous, having been made into a Hollywood blockbuster.  Of greater interest to me is, all these years later, Ishiguro is now a distinguished Nobel Prize-winning author. It was fun to stumble across this very humble, autographed treasure that has languished anonymously in a pile of neglected books.

The second book I found is one I had never been aware of.  It's a first edition of Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece, Slaughterhouse Five, published in 1969. It too was buried in a stack of unsorted books.  Its origin was a complete mystery, its presence on the shelves totally unaccounted for.

A pristine copy of a Slaughterhouse Five first edition can fetch around $600.  But, before you get too excited, this copy is battered and beaten, missing its dust cover, and three of its pages are almost completely torn out which makes it of little value to collectors, not worth even 30 bucks.  It's not the monetary value, or lack of, that's important.  What matters to me is that a book is precious because of its story and what it stands for, especially when it represents a masterpiece possessing great meaning and significance in American literature.  And it's also cool that I met Vonnegut in person at a lecture long ago and am connected to this novel in more ways than one. (Not to mention, he attended Cornell :)

Never throw out a stack of old books without at least looking through it, as even the most humble text has something to tell us, and you never know what treasure you might find.