On buying what was theirs back, some interesting whale news, and in the "I can think of a lot of members of Congress who should be paying attention" department...
The other day I wanted to reread a book that I read in high school. Partly to see if the book was as good as I seem to think it was and partly just to try and recapture that sense of joy where you, the reader, finds themselves in sync with an author who seems to grok what's going on in your mind.
Amazon did not have it. Going further in my search it appeared that no one had it. Various search engines had no mention of either the author or the book and even Abebooks.com didn't have it (and yes, dear reader, I even used the Abe Books Book Sleuth!).
The thing is, as a somewhat voracious reader I've always considered that books would always be around for me to read and reread. I never really considered that, in a lot of cases, books actually have a very short lifespan and once out of print tend to just fade away.
Which has exactly what to do with the whole boat thing?
For quite a while now I've been recommending that the best place to start with the whole cruising off into the sunset gig is to read older books from the 50's/60's/70's about cruising rather than what's currently out there as the whole mindset of what cruising is these days is more about spending money than actually learning the needful skills of sailing further offshore than you're able to swim back from.
That being the case, I never actually imagined that a lot of those older books on sailing, seamanship, and cruising might actually just disappear and no longer be available at all.
Having just read this interesting article about the Internet Archives it occurred to me that it would be no bad thing to get proactive and do something about saving some of the nautical books from the past that are in danger of fading away into that oblivion of out-of-print books.
Listening to some songs related to buses
So it goes...
