I was going through some stuff in the library. In other houses the room would be called my father's study, but for us it was the library. With his father-in-law my father built shelves along the length of the interior wall with cabinets at the bottom of each end.
I grew up with the wall packed with Chemical Abstracts, thick white volumes with blue lettering on the cover. Those were the days when an ordinary person could afford a subscription to Chemical Abstracts. Or maybe because my father did translations for them he got copies for free.
The library and Chem Abstracts loom large in the family mythology for many reasons. The most salient occurred when my father asked quotes for a paint job. I wasn't there. My father said that the painter broke down crying when he saw the wall of Chem Abstracts.
The painter had always wanted to be a chemist. But there was the Depression and ends had to be met. The painter saw someone living his dream.
The story is a graphic example of what can happen if you can't follow your dreams.
But that's not why I started this post. Going through the shelves I found newsletters my mother got. (We like to say that "She's a dietician, but she's better than that." My brother and I were too young to know that "force of nature" was the term we should have used.) The earliest was from 1974. I wasn't going to read them. Before I put them out for recycling I thought I should do something to document them. Hence this image showing different mastheads:
