Orphaned No More

A Book Sale Family

Dear Friends,

The picture above is a lonely orphaned volume we found last year at our used book sale. Was I really going to read volume three of a series I’ve never heard of on the history of England? Probably not. So why buy it? Because one of our ironclad family rules about the book sale is that some volumes are so beautiful that they simply must be purchased. Such books adorn a bookshelf with grandeur.

Of course, I dreamed of somehow reuniting this orphan with his family. Someday I do plan on building a large library, and I need beautiful volumes to fill it. Alas, the rest of the “family” did not show up at the book sale all that week; more than that, I couldn’t find a single set on the Internet that matched this particular binding. It appears to be a custom binding—it has long been customary for large estates to have their libraries filled with “books by the yard,” or custom bound sets not ordinarily available to the masses. That’s why when you see pictures of a library at, say, Blenheim Palace (which I’ve been privileged to see), all of the books are both stunningly beautiful and uniform.

Anyway, as the book sale approached this Spring I told all the girls to keep their eyes out for any long-lost family members of Guizot’s History of England. We always arrive early on opening day because independent booksellers (brick and mortar, as well as online) descend like jackals or—more like—piranhas to scoop up everything they can get their hands on. I know people have to make a living, but there is something I deeply despise about the person armed with a scanner on their phone who sets up shop at a book table, oblivious (and incredibly rude) to other customers, scanning each book to see how much money they can make on it. I like people who actually like books and these people buy stuff they have zero interest in. Anyway, end of rant.

So I was only ten or fifteen people deep in line at the start. I walked into the gymnasium, turned to my immediate left, and the very first thing my eyes met was a box of books on the “special collections” table. I didn’t even have a rational thought: I wrapped my arms around it and picked it up. It wasn’t just Guizot’s missing family members; it was three other matching sets of a history of England, a history of France, and a history of Russia. Behold!

So the orphan was reunited with the whole extended family. And talk about grandeur! Here’s a closer look at the spine and marbling:

The full title page:

It turns out that this guy “Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot,” whom I’d never heard of before, was just … the Prime Minister of France in the mid-1800s. This was back when men, even politicians, were so extremely well-educated that they could just pump out a three-volume history of England and four volumes on the history of France in their spare time. Sigh.

The interior does not disappoint:

When I finally get my library, these beauties are going to give it grandeur, all right.

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Thanks for reading Off The Shelf! Happy reading!