Ken,
I also find reading shelves an asset.  I once visited the home of an
acquaintence who purported to be an authority on art and antiques...not a book
on the shelf in the field except one, by Reader's Digest if I remember.
Query for group: In this day and age of email, listserves and higher
technology, will the younger generations growing up with the stuff, save their
messages? Will they have a newspaper in the morning - and clip and save those
bits and bytes? Will they have saved these short quips on disappearing ink
printouts? Will they worry how to file their cabinets and sort their
bookshelves if their main source of correspondence and info gathering is over
the Web? Will they "bump" into a really neat source of who knows what...and
stuff it into a folder? Will they have no handwritten letters from "grandma"
for their children to find in a trunk - or restorationists to discover had
fallen between the attic floorboards?
email is quick and dirty; I'll scribble on the web faster than sit and write a
letter. Its gets questions out fast and informal - answers from everywhere
just the same. I can only wonder if I'll get old and grey (wait a minute..I
already am...) and sigh to my grandchildren...."the good ol' days with broken
pencil points and ink blots on my cuffs...." as they hunt in dusty antique
shops for outdated computers to run old floppies their ol' grandma saved her
letters on.

Candy B