https://www.zvab.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30435423924&searchurl=an%3DHubensteiner%26hl%3Don%26sortby%3D20%26tn%3DBayerische%2BGeschichte&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title14

Unfortunately, the picture doesn’t show the spine, which is also pretty.

The copy I have has an inscription for the original owner, who got it as a gift, dated Sept 8, 1996 – at Traunstein.

Sounds like the old Slavic reference collection at the University of Illinois Libraries at Urbana-Champaign. Now folded into a larger international and area studies library, unfortunately.

A one-volume history of Bavaria published in 1980–could it be this one, by Karl Bosl?

https://bit.ly/2IPIMpk

There is also a two-volume history of Bavaria by the same author, published in Munich in the 1950s:

https://bit.ly/2IHqQgX

So you weren’t that far off.

Libraries–real, physical libraries–are bastions of the tangible.

That’s quite a dream.

It may also be about a society and rulers that were destroyed by a leftist revolution – at last, the Czar library part.

The Bible is already banned in public schools, hadn’t you noticed? It’s that icky non-atheist thing that is toxic and hateful. Sheesh.

I think this dream is about something tangentially related to this post: why collect things like books? I’d like my personal library to be a resource for the future, a sort of time capsule. If we should lose the Internet, there will still be books.

“Flowers for Algernon” was a heart-breaker. I read it in junior high over forty-five years ago and can still recall the passages that hit me the hardest. Like Harper Lee, Daniel Keyes turned out to be a one-book author. But what a book.

Thanks for sharing your story about Bobby. I think there are a lot of Bobbys out there.

I worked briefly as a day laborer in LA many years ago with two young guys who had just mustered out of the service in San Diego: Vince, the smart one (Navy); and Bob, the slower one (Marines). Vince looked out for Bob. We parted ways when I returned back east. They were saving up to leave California and go live with Bob’s sister in Dubuque. I still often wonder what happened to them. I hope they made it.

Art+Deco,

I got on a Pynchon kick in my late teens-early 20s. Started with “V.” and ended with “Gravity’s Rainbow”. At the time I thought he was a genius, but his appeal decreased as I got older and learned more about life. The books have their bravura interludes but Pynchon’s characters are basically caricatures and placeholders for real human beings. I didn’t read any of his later stuff. A very underestimated mid-20th century writer is John O’Hara: almost anything by him is worth reading. I made the mistake of reading “Imagine Kissing Pete” (one of the three novellas in “Sermons and Soda Water”) on a flight; the ending made me blub.

A huge subplot in The Cay is a prejudiced white boy coming to love a black man, whom he initially thought must be “stupid.” It’s actually a book that kids should be encouraged to read. Why would a school want to ban that? Or any of these books?