It will be difficult, when the time comes, to know what to do with everything in my office. And I know I should be thinking about that now (no, not just thinking, but doing), but I seem unable to.

I have as much stuff as the average hoarder, but I don’t think I qualify as a hoarder, because virtually everything I have is, to me, of interest.

Take for example one shelf out of many in my office.

Yes, on the shelf you find a bust of a very worried Moses, given to me by my sister decades ago.

It is signed D. Fisher, but I am not sure who that is. It might be David Fisher, who died in 2013, but the signature is not his usual All-CAPS signature. Moses is wearing two Ben Gurion University of the Negev baseball caps, two sets of Mardi Gras beads, and a medal with my name on it demonstrating actual proof that indeed I was on the staff of The Harvard Crimson.

But, as usual, it is the books that interest me most. Not that they are all valuable, just interesting. Somebody would want them, I am sure.

The radical right wing has always been here, in the 1950s, as well as today. If you are near my age, you probably remember these. Ah, nostalgia. It isn’t what it used to be.

Rags to riches. “A Horatio Alger story” was the way many “only in America” stories were told.  Until I found these two books, I thought Horatio Alger was a character, not an author. Alger himself (1832-1899) was not a Horatio Alger story, but the son of a prominent Unitarian minister, and a graduate of Harvard, 110 years or so before me.

Sometimes, you have no choice but to judge books by their cover. Such as these books, written in a Spanish I cannot read. But often the covers get very high marks. And you don’t feel bad if you never get around to opening them up. Ibenez, who died in 1928, was anti-monarchist and wrote at least 40 books. That means, if I am to read them all, I had better get to work.

The Zigzag books were written for teenagers in the 1890s by a man with the unbeatable name of Hezekiah Butterworth. Schoolboy trips through Europe. Travelogues? Adventure stories? I don’t even know.

Maybe Donald Trump would like this one. William Faulkner’s speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Somewhere else in this room, I have Albert Camus’.

One more for today.

Yes, it is in Russian. This is the official transcript of the Russian trial of Francis Gary Powers, thevAmerican U-2 pilot shot down by the Soviets over Sverdlovsk, shortly after U. S. President Eisenhower assured the Russians that we had no spy planes flying over their country. The rest is history.

Part 2 tomorrow.