Donaters

I have been looking through the donations we get at the library since I first started here. They're endlessly fascinating. But mostly they're fascinating in the way I might find rummaging through a junkyard fascinating. Finding something unique or wonderful or valuable is profoundly rare. What we mostly get is useless drek in a range of conditions that runs from "almost destroyed" all the way up to "it looks mint but if you examine it closely you can see there's something not quite perfect about it". That last analysis may seem a bit picky to you and I suppose you're right when it comes to evaluating a hardcover copy of Danielle Steele's Bittersweet, but makes more of a difference when I'm turning over a signed first edition copy of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. I've no doubt done the former many times. I've never done the latter. Perhaps I'm keeping in practice in an optimistic sort of way.

Yesterday we had an entire cart of donated CDs all gathered together. They were in excellent condition. But they were so awful and uninteresting that, to the detriment of this post, I can't recall a single title. Oh, I applied the titles to my brain, but they were so flat and dimensionless that they just dropped right off. Wait! Was there something by the Backstreet Boys? No, no, it was a Backstreet Boys like group. Does that help?

Anyway, looking over all of these CDs, plus poking around in two large sets of shelves full of forgotten nineties self help books, my 20 plus years of donation examinations finally produced a sudden, conclusive analysis:

Everyone with good taste is a hoarder.