The World Needs the Pack Rats

Many years ago I read The Agony and and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. It is the fictionalized biography of Michelangelo. I loved it. I was thinking about the book a while back and thought I would see what other books Stone had written. Which proved to be my downfall. I wanted to read several but all except one was out of print. So, I started trolling the used book stores on line.


I found everything I was looking for at a used book store in St. Cloud, MN called Books Revisited. I have ordered books from them before. And one day I will head out there to check out the store. St. John's University is there and it is one of my favorite college campuses. Not to mention the best college football games in the nation. It's an all boys school so the cheerleaders are boys. And the monks that live there sell amazing bread.





Anyway, back to the point of all this: If it wasn't for the pack rats of this world we may not have the ability to find some of these out of print items. The book I am currently reading is Lust for Life which is the tale of Van Gogh. The book that I ordered is a beautiful hardback printed in 1953. It has wonderful illustrations through the book.

And because I am now curious to see more of Van Gogh's work I went to my book shelves to see if the art books my parents gave me included his collection. Sure enough:I also picked up Origin - A biographical novel of Charles Darwin. And Passions of the Mind - A novel of Sigmund Freud

Both the hubster and I are pack rats which gets to be a problem as I see my house fill up more and more. But it's times like these when I am glad we don't chuck everything. With the internet we could easily have decided to donate the art book collection to the library but since I am of the age when we still looked information up in books and used a library card catalog I just couldn't bring myself to toss such beautiful reference resources.