Originally published at: Ruth Bader Ginsburg's personal library is up for auction | Boing Boing
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I wonder who owns her estate, her kids seem very successful and not in need of money so why not donate a lot of that stuff to a law library somewhere.
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I’d pay over $500 for her copy of Beloved inscribed to her by Morrison and I am not a rich person. Seems very low.
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Not to be out done, Donald J Trump is selling off his personal library too.
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Currently at $4800. Makes much more sense. I wish they hadn’t put so many of the books in lots. I probably could have afforded one.
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Agreed. There’s a few that are grouped that if they broke up would be more available to the general public.
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The annotated pages should be scanned in and made available online-- a display case in a museum won’t be as useful.
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Sometimes it’s not about the money as much as it is about not having the space to have an entire other house in your house.
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You’ve convinced me. I’m buying it and scanning them in. I’ll post my NFT auction here on BBS first if anyone wants dibs.
/s
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Having an annotated copy in an archive has been perfectly acceptable for a while now. It’s going to take decades to scan the material that are already in archives. It is not an easy or simple process to get unique copies like this digitized, so having it available NOW for researchers seems more high priority.
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I ain’t carrying that kind of cheddar around.
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Copyright clearance would also be a nightmare.
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I can’t decide if it would be a disappointing revelation or a wonderful one to learn that there was a dogeared copy of Fifty Shades of Grey in that stack somewhere.
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Exactly. I have to wonder about these sales of libraries of famous people. Do they curate them beforehand to cull books that it would embarrassing to have? The late Umberto Eco reportedly had over 30,000 books in his personal library. I can’t imagine that none of them were trash.
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I have over 30,000 books, and do not consider my Anne-Marie Villefranche Paris-in-the-1920s erotic novel trashy.
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Sadly*, it was broken up.
Eco’s modern library, comprising about 30,000 volumes, and the archive will be given on loan, for 90 years, to the Alma Mater of Bologna, where Eco taught for most of his life.
His collection of ancient books, consisting of about 1,200 volumes and titled "Bibliotheca semiologica Curosa, lunatica, magica et pneumatica,” will be kept by the Braidense National Library in Milan.
- for medievalists who also teach semiotics, at least.
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It may be the resolution, but a lot of those books seem to be stored spine in.
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