Our Books Have a Home

After piano lessons this morning, we loaded up the van and trekked across town to Nellis Air Force Base to meet up with some Great Books sellers Kevin found on Craig's List. The whole way there I thought about how excited I was to possibly own such a collection of books, and how sad I would be if they turned out to be in poor condition.

We rendezvoused at the Visitor Center and this nice Air Force couple opened the trunk of their Camry, and there were the books! Gold! Solid gold, and I got them for $150.00! They are in brand-new, perfect condition. Once I got them home, I went through many of them, and some had never been opened, you could tell by the binding.

Here they are in their boxes, just waiting to move onto our shelves, and then be read:

Sixty volumes. I'm totally in love with them, and with all of the challenge and reading and learning I have ahead.

If you're wondering what the heck they are, there is a really good explanation HERE on Wikipedia. The article connects the volumes I have with the curriculum/method I've been learning more about (recently in A Thomas Jefferson Education). And once I read it, I finally understood how Classics, Mortimer Adler, and several colleges I'd recently heard mentioned were related. If you do check out the Wikipedia article, read the section under the heading "Series", and you'll know what I bought. I have the 1990 edition.

The rest of my afternoon was spent preparing and then arranging our new book shelves. I had so much fun.

Here are the shelves with the trim painting and dusting done:

And here are the boxes of books piled and waiting to be unpacked:

Finally... the completed project:

Even with our new 60-volume set of Great Books, the encyclopedias we needed for our "classroom", photo albums, and all of our other books - there is still room to grow on these shelves. Not that I think I'll be buying many more new books in the near future!