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levite · 04-20-2010, 12:17 PM

Honestly, the best and most interesting job I ever had was the summer in between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college. I worked as a cataloguer for a used and rare bookstore (he specialized in Judaica, bibles, and Holocaust literature and documentation). This would've been 1990, if I recall right, and said bookseller was getting his rare book inventory onto a computer database for the first time ever. So, no only did I have to evaluate all of his rare book holdings, but also his new acquisitions as they came in. It was like a piece of heaven. I was in the quiet back room of the shop, listening to my favorite music on my Sony Walkman, and the only worky part of the work was entering the data into a cheap-ass database program on a Mac Classic II.

The bulk of my time was spent examining rare books and documents. Some highlights included a 1536 bible from Germany: one of the second printing of Luther's new translation. It was magnificent. I also evaluated a collection of legal documents, evidence, and case notes compiled by the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials. A couple of the case notes included notations penned by Justice Jackson, and by Attorney Taylor. I looked at a first edition of Theodor Herzl's Alteneuland (The Old New Land, Herzl's vision of a Jewish State that really propelled Zionism into a worldwide Jewish movement). I examined a tractate of Talmud from the collection of the Vilna Gaon (Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilnius, 18th century, a HUGE figure in Jewish history). I held a memorandum from the office of Adolf Eichmann, cosigned by Heinrich Himmler: a sickeningly chilling experience. And, in the less Jewish areas, I also looked through first editions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Stoker's Dracula, and W.B. Yeat's The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. And those are just the highlights I recall off the top of my head.

God, that was a magical summer. If I could have made a living doing it, I would've done that for the rest of my life....

04-20-2010, 12:17 PM	#3 (permalink)
levite Minion of Joss Location: The Windy City	Honestly, the best and most interesting job I ever had was the summer in between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college. I worked as a cataloguer for a used and rare bookstore (he specialized in Judaica, bibles, and Holocaust literature and documentation). This would've been 1990, if I recall right, and said bookseller was getting his rare book inventory onto a computer database for the first time ever. So, no only did I have to evaluate all of his rare book holdings, but also his new acquisitions as they came in. It was like a piece of heaven. I was in the quiet back room of the shop, listening to my favorite music on my Sony Walkman, and the only worky part of the work was entering the data into a cheap-ass database program on a Mac Classic II. The bulk of my time was spent examining rare books and documents. Some highlights included a 1536 bible from Germany: one of the second printing of Luther's new translation. It was magnificent. I also evaluated a collection of legal documents, evidence, and case notes compiled by the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials. A couple of the case notes included notations penned by Justice Jackson, and by Attorney Taylor. I looked at a first edition of Theodor Herzl's Alteneuland (The Old New Land, Herzl's vision of a Jewish State that really propelled Zionism into a worldwide Jewish movement). I examined a tractate of Talmud from the collection of the Vilna Gaon (Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilnius, 18th century, a HUGE figure in Jewish history). I held a memorandum from the office of Adolf Eichmann, cosigned by Heinrich Himmler: a sickeningly chilling experience. And, in the less Jewish areas, I also looked through first editions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Stoker's Dracula, and W.B. Yeat's The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. And those are just the highlights I recall off the top of my head. God, that was a magical summer. If I could have made a living doing it, I would've done that for the rest of my life.... __________________ Dull sublunary lovers love, Whose soul is sense, cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove That thing which elemented it. (From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)