digging out books

 I have a LOT of books, and in recent years (especially when I was having renovations done), I moved a bunch of them around to different places. This is always hazardous to try because then I forget where I put things.

As I was taking a short break from "Between Two Rivers" (which I will finish soon), I was reading one of those British Library collections of older mystery short-stories. This was academic/school-related mysteries and one was a Raffles* story where he and Bunny returned to their old "public" school as Old Boys....and I'm not done with it yet. Apparently no murder, which is nice, most of these do involve complicated thefts.

(*Raffles is also known as The Amateur Cracksman; theft of valuables from people richer than him. And I admit, there was something on Bluesky today about some guy who wrote a "theft is okay, maybe" essay, though in this case it was theft from (public) museums into private collections, and that feels particularly wrong. I mean, I suppose I could forgive the Jean Valjean type of theft, where it's food for someone genuinely starving (though I would HOPE in a civilized country there were enough things like food banks to make sure no one HAD to), but stealing to further pleasure or enrich a selfish person? absolutely not. Or shoplifting for the "fun" of it, which damages public trust and leads to things like people like me being asked to show our receipts walking out of wal-mart when the control person could clearly see I went through a checkout with a checker and paid for the stuff. And yes, that rankles me, and someone who had never interacted with me on there before caught a block from me after sniping at me that I shouldn't be allowed to be annoyed at the "minor inconvenience" of it being hinted I was a criminal because....I don't even know).

But anyway: Raffles isn't real, and he mainly, in the stories I read about him, he is stealing from pretty awful people, and in some cases the proceeds help someone else.

And it's a very particular type of late 19th c. type of story; I joked that "surely Raffles/Bunny slashfiction exists" (and yes, it apparently does, and what's more, is that possibly Hornung was AWARE of the cryptically-gay impression but never really denied it - which he might have had to, back then, after all, Oscar Wilde went to prison...)

And in a ways, Raffles is sort of an inverse Sherlock Holmes - committing crimes rather than solving them, and Bunny is his Watson.

But I remembered that years ago, back when I was in grad school, I had run across a Raffles story and wanted to read more, and special ordered a compilation volume (I think it was from the old and now-gone Borders' outlet in my parents' town)

I wondered where I had put it, and if I could find it (or if I'd given it away in a fit of cleaning once). 

After doing my afternoon workout (I didn't feel like it this morning), I took a couple moments and checked the shelves in my former guest room (now mostly a boxroom).

And yes, there it was:

 Yes, they're old stories, and like a lot of these there is some casual racism and other stuff objectionable now, but I also realize that's how people wrote and thought back then and hopefully we've improved today. 

I also found another book I had bought a long time ago, pretty sure this one was from the dear, departed A Common Reader catalog. (I used to get those, back before they folded in 2005 or so. They were nice catalogs, small newsprint pages stapled together and full of descriptions of unusual and often-scholarly books - not bestsellers but what I'd describe as "books you didn't know you needed until you read about them." I'm sure Amazon and their ilk was what did them in but I do miss them).

I had wanted, a while back, to learn a little Latin but being busy got in my way. Finally, last summer, I ran through what Duolingo had on Latin. So now I can say things like "I like the tables in the inn" or "Corinna has a plate and a cup" but I don't know the RULES and I admit I don't understand the noun declensions (a form of which exists in German, and I still don't quite have the hang of THAT). So finding this book made me think I could learn a bit more. (I also have a copy of Wheelock somewhere, I know better where that is. I had forgotten I had this one)