20141113.0630

It seems that more people read what I write when I write prose than when I write verse. That they still read when I write verse tells me I am not so far gone as a Vogon, but it still suggests that more lines on the page ought to be sentences than free verse or iambic pentameter. (Not that I do much of the latter.) For today, at least, I will take the hint.

I have on occasion noted histories of things on my shelves and in my home. I do entertain the idea that I might put together some collection of creative nonfiction that discusses a number of them, but that will have to wait until a large number of other projects are completed (including a freelance project I really need to write today). In the meantime, though, I can relate a bit about one of them (and it *may* make it into the hypothetical later collection, although I will doubtlessly amend it and improve it; the kind of writing I do in this webspace is not exactly as polished as I would have it be to be in print):

I often note that I "cut my teeth on Asimov," and it is more or less true; an early memory has me looking at the expanded collection of Foundation novels my mother had just after Foundation's Edge came out, thirty years after the Foundation Trilogy. Even now, I have copies of a number of the Good Doctor's books on my shelves, including paperbacks of the Foundation series--including Forward the Foundation. It is a first paperback run of the work, and it is battered and abused through repeated reading, the sweeping art-insert behind the front cover long since gone. (I know that I will at some point need to replace it. I do not look forward to doing so.)

That copy is one of two I received when I was ten or eleven. Both my parents and one of my grandmothers had bought a copy for me, the former as part of a complete set of the Foundation novels (which says much of who and what I have been and still am, as well as the support for it I was provided), the latter as a single item. I recall being happy to receive both as well as confused as to whose gift to keep; I no longer recall whose I did, which copy still manages to be on my shelf more than twenty years later.

It does not matter, really. The important thing is that I have had as many years of enjoyment from the piece--which I contend betrays the Good Doctor's awareness of his impending death from complications of AIDS (he had several surgeries and thus several transfusions in the 1980s, after HIV emerged in force but before physicians knew to screen blood for it)--as I have. I have said that I will need to replace the copy at some point; the day will come when the binding fails and the pages flutter away, or the pages will tear and no tape will save them. But a volume held for decades is not one so easily set aside, and I am something of a bibliophile in any event...I do not relish the thought.