And This, Kids, is Grandpa's Book Collection

I assume my father got rid of most of his LPs at one point in the past few decades. I'm not even sure what's happened to his audio cassettes of the Dead that used to be prominently displayed in his office at home (this was as the CD revolution was beginning, and before he must have started juicing with some book-buying steroid). There were, however, a small collection of records that we had in the den in St. Louis and, though I can't remember most of the titles there (I don't appreciate music enough to have committed this impressive list to memory), I know that Sgt. Pepper's was there, as were other legendary titles by legendary people.

Reading Jacob Weisberg's article on Slate (also published this week in Newsweek) about Amazon's Kindle and the way it(s technological descendants) will change civilization as we know it (and I think he's right), I'm now beginning to ponder what it will be like to be a cultural dinosaur. Every generation has their baggage, I imagine, racism, homophobia, sexual stifling, thinking that long-distance calls are expensive, LPs/8 tracks/cassettes/CDs/mp3s, the art of setting a VCR, baking baked potatoes, no kosher milchigs for Passover, large and powerful Conservative synagogues, being anti-communist, the Wales and Campbell conferences, no LCS (or no wildcards in baseball), et c. One of my (many) pieces of baggage, that my children and grandchildren will never appreciate in the same way, is the physical library. They will, luckily, embrace their packratedness as I have begun to, in digital form, with easy search engines and far fewer boxes to pack when we move - though the joy of re-categorizing and alphabetizing my library is one of the great pleasures I have.