Estate Sale Gleanings #1

My new life as proprietor of this small antique shop demands that I go to estate sales regularly and sift through the remains of some poor soul's life as through the detritus of a lost civilization.

This morning I was at one of the larger ones, where you arrive early, take a number, and wait in line to walk through the estate. I bought a coffee and biscotta at Cafe Bruno and rode my bike over to an old brick mansion on Summit Avenue. The sun had just come up. I was number 8. A buyer from an independent bookseller here in the city was in front of me so we chatted a bit. I guess he had heard that there was a nice library.

By 8:30 I had a beautiful set of silver in a mahogany and velvet case, a 19th century oak wardrobe, and a first edition of Tristram Shandy I'm not sure what makes me think anyone will buy a first edition of Tristram Shandy, but I'm also not sure that I care.

There's just something about owning - even if for only a time - a first edition of Tristram Shandy.

Of course I've never read Tristram Shandy, but it's one of those books one somehow knows about.

I picked it up tonight off of my counter.

Here's the first sentence:

I WISH either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing; – that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind ; – and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost : — Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, — I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

Interesting ...