Keeping a Record
A next step came on a warm evening in New Orleans. A friend listening to my talk about fables - and perhaps sick of it! - suggested that I keep a list of each book and where I got it. Good idea! I am surprised now that it took someone's suggestion to help me think of keeping a record, of creating a list. The researcher in me has gone back to look for those early lists, put together before the time when each of us had a computer and printer. The lists grew larger and larger. The oldest list I can find, which came from 1985, describes 92 books and mentions also five postcards, a play script, a calendar, a set of playing cards, and ten objects. For comparison, the "cards" section of the collection now contains some 3,500 cards. The collection has come a long way!
Collector's Comment: Those printed lists evolved into printed catalogues which mark stages in the collection's development. The first printed catalogue in 1989 uses 153 pages to catalogue 744 books. The fourth in 1991 uses 195 pages to catalogue 957 books. The seventh in 1994 uses 434 pages to catalogue 1,907 books.
The computer age helped facilitate the printing of the catalogues. By now the collection was something to be proud of. More than I may have realized, the catalogues helped make fellow collectors and scholars aware of the collection. Of course, I had the experience every author dreads: finding catalogues which I had given to people now offered for a few dollars in used bookshops!
Other than through those catalogues, it has not been easy to go back and see how fast the collection expanded. Articles about the collection that I have recovered tell me that there were 5,400 books in the collection by 2006 and 6,789 by December of 2011.