We turned on the lights just long enough to arrange our things and hit the sack—separate sacks. The following morning marked the first of many spent exploring West Wind together. The boxes in dry storage represented but a small fraction of the library; there were still thousands that needed to be sorted. This day would be spent gathering the last of the rarest books and shuttling them up to North Conway for safekeeping. Saving the rarest books often meant agreeing on how old a book had to be in order to be considered for storage. After extended deliberation we reached what, in hindsight, appears to be a random decision: 1845. These books would be stacked on the long oval table in the center of the first floor and would be trucked off to join the rest. We would eventually hire an appraiser to handpick the most valuable ones for donation. Further additions could be made on a case-by-case basis, but we would generally leave most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century books behind. I knew that this meant missing dozens, if not hundreds, of valuable works, but for the time being, I couldn’t see a way around it.
