Astrolearn astrology library progress report
– No. 7: 10th September 2015
The past week has been a relatively quiet one of incremental progress with cataloguing; but there is still plenty of that ahead.
My hopes of having the eleven “Astrolite” issues edited by L. H. Weston that I purchased last month in hand by now unfortunately have not borne fruit. The package from the USA seems to have arrived, awaiting my collection; but a customs officer has put over four times too much import tax on the bill for it, seemingly rating it at the 25% VAT rate when it should (as printed matter) be rated at 6% according to Swedish law. The tax bill I’m being expected to pay is over 450 SEK higher than it should be. My message querying this, sent early on Monday afternoon, still has not yet met with a response other than an automated holding response the same day. This leaves me for the time being in limbo, unable to collect the package without paying a significant amount of money that I don’t rightfully owe for the privilege. I can only say at this stage that I hope this unfortunate matter will be resolved by this time next week.
As far as the cataloguing progress is concerned, in the past week I’ve dealt with the Lynn Thorndike shelf, the Teubner and Project Hindsight editions shelf, the W. J. Tucker shelf, the very large oversized books shelf, the first of the two academic dissertations shelves, and a half-shelf of other academic and historical books. Today I’m working on the first of eleven remaining hardback book shelves, which takes quite some time because it is all academic books, which tend by their nature to require extra details and footnotes.
It’s likely to take another two weeks of full-time work to complete those eleven shelves of hardbacks. Then beyond that I still have the unbound dissertations shelf to tackle (not a job I’m looking forward to because it is difficult to keep unbound stacks of papers in neat and tidy order), as well as ideally several shelves of miscellaneous A4-format non-academic mid-late-20th-century books. Realistically, I can’t expect to have finished the job before the beginning of October at this stage.
Purchase-wise, things have been quiet lately. I have one or two enquiries for previously lacked academic editions pending, but I’d rather not jinx them by reporting on them before they are finalised, and my main aim at the moment is to finish the task in hand.
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