The Prodigal Box Arrives

Back in July on the Operation Highlander blog, I wrote about demobilizing my library. I donated a handful of my books to CN Constable and CN Silex, packed some of them into my luggage, and consigned others to the care of the Royal Mail. The Royal Mail angle required an investment of probably around sixty or seventy dollars, and a couple of hours of my time in Aberdeen and Kirkwall that I'll never get back. I mailed three packages, and two of them arrived fairly quickly. The other one... Didn't. In late January, I went to the post office to check on it. I checked repeatedly at the address where I'd sent the package in the first place, but nothing. Fortunately, the five items in that package were reasonably easy to replace (although two items which I'll describe shortly had some sentimental value.)

Well, today, that third box finally arrived. I had given up on it last week - in fact, I reordered used copies of two of those books via Amazon. One of them arrived yesterday, and the other one will probably be here by the end of the week, so I'm now on the hook to unload them. So, what did I wind up getting?

The two books with sentimental value were acquired in a convenient meeting with the author, at which point they were personally inscribed to me. These were The Yompers: With 45 Commando in the Falklands War, and In the Service of the Sultan: A First Hand Account of the Dhofar Insurgency, the latter of which I had purchased on my Kindle nearly a year before, and subsequently used the living daylights out of for writing my dissertation. I was really glad to get those back.

The other two books in the box were Storm Front: The Epic True Story of a Secret War, the SAS's Greatest Battle, and the British Pilots Who Saved Them and Saving Private Sarbi. I reordered these books last week, and Storm Front has already arrived. I used Storm Front (sparingly, due to time and subject limitations) on my dissertation, and really wanted to have it for my follow-on writings on the Dhofar Rebellion. I posted about Saving Private Sarbi when discussing my Summer reading agenda, and looking back at that post, I'm actually pretty stoked that I finished three of the four books (keeping in mind that I was already about halfway through Arabian Sands when I arrived in Aberdeen). So, despite the challenge of having to get rid of the extras once they've both arrived, I'm totally stoked that they're here.

The last item was the Explorer Map of Oman, which I got and then never really used - but I will! This map and Storm Front, as well as a number of other books from Op Highlander, were sourced by CN Governor, who worked dutifully at Blackwells and was able to special order some items for me.

So, it's nice to have that proverbial "hanging chad" sorted out.