From the New York Times comes a story any dedicated reader will love.
Kathryn Gursky, a former librarian from Los Alamos, New Mexico, lost her home and all of her 2,300 books when a forest fire devastated her neighborhood in May of 2000. Her home is now rebuilt and her home library is well on its way to recovery after her husband bought her a unique gift for her birthday this fall: the entire collection of the Penguin Classics Library. That's 1,082 books, purchased from Amazon for $8,000.
Ms. Gursky's collection arrived in mid-September packed in 25 boxes, shrink-wrapped on a pallet and weighing nearly 700 pounds. Since then, Ms. Gursky has spent countless hours unpacking, shelving, categorizing, alphabetizing and rearranging the books. Oh, yes - and reading; she said she had completed more than 30 of the books in the last eight weeks. Even at that rather remarkable pace, it would take her about six years to make her way through the entire collection.
So where did she start? "I ran my finger along the shelves, closed my eyes and stopped on one," Ms. Gursky said, sitting in an overstuffed chair in her new library, 31 rows of great literature looming behind her.
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