Much Ado about NOTHING

When my wyfe's elderly aunt was in a nursing home a couple of summers ago (she died last year), we flew to California and helped to clean up her house in Pacific Palisades. She was a charming, witty woman, but unfortunately a world-class hoarder, so it was quite a labor for all involved. As a sort of reward for pitching in, I was given one of her books that I fancied (she had thousands of books), a tome entitled N by E by the 20th-century artist Rockwell Kent. The book is a true-life memoir of Kent's summer 1929 voyage to (and shipwreck on the rocks of) Greenland. The prose is poetic though not terribly interesting -- I've skipped around in it -- but the many, many Art Deco-style wood-block print illustrations are stunning. They have a numinous quality that doesn't have much specifically to do with a sea trip to Greenland. You can see some examples of his style here.

When I got home from California, I put the book on a shelf and only looked at it sporadically when I was in an introspective mood. I didn't know if it was worth much, although I noted that it's a first edition, published in 1930. Today, on a whim, and wondering if maybe I should sell it, I did some online research and found out that it's worth about $50. Meh. If it was signed by the author/artist, it would be worth a little over $200. The ebook sells for about $10 on [a river in Brazil]. The illustrations are affecting, though -- far more on aging book paper than on a computer screen. I would even call them meditative. It's hard to put a price on that, though I think it would be more than $50 and definitely more than $10. Oh, and it smells good, as old books sometimes do. I'll keep it.