At a garage sale a couple of weeks ago, I was pawing through a table full of books when I chanced to look down at a box beneath the table ...Yes, that's a swastika on the spine.
No, it's not a book by, or about, Nazis.
It's eight of the ten volumes of the "Sahib Edition" of the works of Rudyard Kipling, published circa 1909. Back then, the swastika was a non-controversial Indian symbol.
I'm not a trained book appraiser, which is fine because I don't buy books with an eye toward resale. But I'd personally grade the condition as ranging from "poor" to "fair," and I feel like the $4 I paid for the lot was a sweet deal (in a few cursory online searches, I have yet to find a single volume from the collection, let alone eight of them, in any condition, for a price that low). Since the works are long out of copyright, I may scan some of the frontispiece illustrations and use them here and there.
At the same sale, I paid 50 cents for a 1918 edition of the Oxford Edition of the Poems of Tennyson. The front cover has been torn off, but I couldn't resist it because of the hand-written inscription inside:
Lake Lodge School
Senior Composition Prize
Kenneth Joyner
Presented by Mrs. Daw
June 1921
The only Lake Lodge School I've been able to track down was a private school in Grimsby, Ontario, which was indeed operating at the time in question. I haven't been able to find any information on Kenneth Joyner or Mrs. Daw yet, but I'd like very much to do so and to give the book to someone for whom it might have sentimental or family history value.
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