Personal Libraries and Devastating Wildfires

The Kincade Fire had been burning for a couple of days and the National Weather Service alerted us that 70 mph winds were on the way. I live in Santa Rosa, California, and my home was becoming surrounded by mandatory evacuation zones. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) announced they were cutting power in more areas, too. Homes and businesses were starting to burn. As my wife and I talked about evacuation, I started thinking about my books.

My book collection as it stands today is … I like to think of it as a carefully curated distillation of the mighty thing it once was. As a museum curator, my career has taken me on big moves a few times, to the point that today I own maybe a modest few hundred books as opposed to the several thousand I’ve owned over the course of my entire life. But even a few hundred books is a lot of books. My wife’s collection is about the same size, likely giving us around a thousand books or so between us. Though we’ve been together for about five years now, we only just started shelving our books commingled together recently. These things take time, right?

The fire was about 15 miles away but was growing and growing, expected to become larger than the devastating Tubbs Fire of 2017 that burned thousands of homes in our city and though we weren’t here for it, everyone we know was. The whole city gets anxious when there’s…