the book count, etc.

Just checked my inventory, and in total I own 1,615 books.

1,009 of those are here in Cairo.

606 books are (mostly) in a storage locker in Iowa, though 20 or so are in a closet in the guest bedroom of my parents’ home nearby

I’ve literally not entered that storage locker since departing for Egypt in August 2000, so I own hundreds of books that I have not even seen in nearly a decade, including a number of the Heidegger volumes. I probably ought to scroll through that list and remind myself of what I have.

There’s one sure test for whether you own too many books, and I’ve already passed it. That’s when you accidentally buy a book that you already own, not realizing that you already own it. It’s happened to me three times by now.

What’s the weirdest book story you have? Well, my weirdest is that the original manuscript of Tool-Being was treated literally as a weapon of mass destruction… The person opening the envelope sent all that lint into the air from the envelope padding and thought it was an anthrax attack (and the office where this occurred was a legitimate possible terrorist target; I’ll explain why in the future, someday). The police cordoned off the building and seized my manuscript. And no, this wasn’t in the USA, or Egypt, but elsewhere, in a country where neither English nor Arabic is widely spoken.

But otherwise, it was probably the time I found two books in an Iowa City store that I wanted, one by Baudrillard and another by Fichte. Slightly odd combination already. I had no many, so went for home to get some. When I returned to the bookstore a couple of hours later, a strange pair of gentleman was standing in the Philosophy section, so I decided to wait until they left. They’d be worth a story in their own right, but let’s focus on the book story this time. In any case, while killing time, I overheard them reading through passages of the Baudrillard book and making fun of it. This was really just an amusing coincidence, but to my horror (because I really wanted that book, and this was pre-Amazon when ordering was a minor hassle) I saw that they were going to buy the book after mocking it aloud for 10 minutes. I wasn’t going to get it. And as they walked past me I saw a single book in the other guy’s hand too: the Fichte book! I didn’t get either of the two.

I never saw those two guys before or since, though they could easily have been U. of Iowa graduate students judging from their basic appearance and attitude. When weird things like that happen, you think of angels or devils walking the earth, since these are said to take human form to facilitate their actions.

Speaking of which, did anyone ever read Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City? There’s another candidate for the “books I wish I had written myself” list! It was even hovering on the bestseller list for awhile.

It’s a Chicago book, a brilliant parallel study of (a) Daniel Burnham and the great Chicago World’s Fair in the 1890’s, featuring the first ferris wheel and many other attractions, and (b) H.H. Holmes, possibly America’s first urban serial killer, who operated a sinister hotel near the Fair equipped with gas vents, body chutes, and basement dissection tables, and killed possibly 200 or more guests during the Fair.

When you read about Holmes, and the incredible number of crimes he was able to commit while eluding detection, you come as close as possible to thinking that this really was the devil walking the earth in human form. He really seemed superhuman in the things he was able to get away with. Eventually he was captured, found by a life insurance detective rather than the police. He was hanged in Philadelphia in 1896. Supposedly, the insurance detective’s company office burned down shortly after the hanging, and the only remaining item found in the ashes was– a photo of H.H. Holmes! OK, maybe an urban myth, but still perhaps the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard. The calling card of Satan.