There's Gold in Them There Books

It was a busy day. We did some Christmas deep cleaning in the house getting ready for the holiday. We had a storm where Princess 3 and I got to shovel snow for 1 1/2 hours after a plow put lots of wet snow in our driveway. We had the nutcracker performance and that took the next three hours.

Princess 2 is trying to help me organize things. She decided that today she would attack the golden book collection. When I organized it before, I just put all the numbers in order. However, an interesting fact about golden books is they published the same book with up to four different numbers... So, when I would go to check my list to see if we already owned a specific book, I would look to see if we had that number. This caused me to purchase the same book up to four times, all with different numbers.

Since Princess 2 has a gift for organization and a weird ability to remember spacial and titled things, she went through and pulled all the double copies out of the bookshelf for me. I knew we had doubles and that they had different numbers but I figured we would only have a few doubles. We had over 60 doubles since they made more than one or two copies of the same book for different printings and then went through many different classification and labeling types. Currently, Golden books have no indication about which printing, specific dates and have no numbering system on their books. 

It makes it harder to catalog them without the number. I had the little key code in with the books so if you wanted a specific book, you just looked it up by the number as they were all in order.

Princess 2 found all the copies and I had no idea it would take so long to go through them all and put them all back in order and then retype the list adding the doubles and the numbers which are the same so I wouldn't continue buying books that I already had. I was shocked to see that I had 60 doubles. Of course, the fronts and backs aren't always the same and in a few rare cases, they changed the wording or title to be politically correct but it was interesting to me that some of the old 35 cent books had the same cover design as a copy that was recently printed. Other times, they just changed the background color of the cover design. The backs have gone through lots of changes. I thought it funny that they kept most of the back the same over the more recent printings but changed out the pink panther for bugs bunny and then more recently added a little witch on a broom. Only that one spot character on the upper left corner of the book changed.

I have a book collection for each of the girls. They will have to pick numbers to see who gets to choose first but we have some classic book collections as my girls were avid readers. Some still are. In the past week, several asked about going to the library as they want the latest book in a series they have read. I posted in the past about our "library" and you can see post one on that here. I mention our golden books in the second post on our "library." (See that post here) I ended up being up late into the night to get the "organization" under control so Princess 4 could have her floor back. It is nice to have the doubles out and I can tell from the past week that Princess 2 is feeling TONS better after her surgery. She is looking for things to keep her busy. I on the other hand, have way too much keeping me busy. It is nice to have it done and the list updated.

I don't buy the books anymore unless they are first printing and old but in good condition. That is a rare find. I bought my first Golden books when Princess one was a baby at a cost of 2 for $1. Since then we have added to it and I love that it covers all collections. Snoopy, Disney, Sesame Street, Warner Brothers, Dr. Suess, Barbie, pooh, Barney, etc. It is a nice collection which covers it all.