Update 18-Feb-2021 - Donated!
The collection has been transferred to the Internet Archive, for future scanning & storage. Thanks to Jason Scott, Kevin O'Heir and Victor for facilitating this. The one exception to keeping the collection together was the original copy I had of the Animation Toolkit, a mid-1980's application for the original Macintosh. I sent this off to Pinot Ichwandardi, an artist in New York who is still using 1980s vintage Macintoshes to produce art and animation today.
This is a basic photo inventory of the books recovered from the fire in my home office in October 2016. It was an electrical fire, causing minor flame damage but massive smoke damge. Most of the books were in very good condition; I took good care of them and had them all in bookshelves. The fire left a distinct odor on the books. Most of the books have soot deposits on the top and spine; some have more on the cover. The soot is cleaned off pretty easily, but I don't know if the smoke smell can be fully removed. This makes them interesting candidates for destructive scanning.
Books with red marks painted on the photo indicate volumes I've pulled aside, either for sentimental reasons or because I'm concerned I can't replace them. These are not available. This marking isn't 100% accurate, it's from memory after I took all the photos; so a few unmarked books may also be pulled aside.
As you'll see, a lot of these are art and technical books that weren't cheap when they were purchased new. Some of the topics covered are: art, film, animation, cartoons, science fiction, computer art, computer graphics, computer science, electronics, math, science, space exploration. Nerd stuff.
I am declaring these an insurance loss, so I am not accepting payment for them. If the books are taken by a non-profit, I'm willing to chip in up to $300 to help defray the cost of moving them. I do not want to deal with parting out the collection; I have limited time for dealing with this.
The books are stored in a shed. They're reasonably safe there, but the shed is ~20 years old and I can't guarentee it's 100% water tight. The shed may need to come down this fall depending on construction on the house. Contact me via @isonno on Twitter, or jp[at]acm.org if you're interested.
This is a complete set of annotated Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs & Captain Easy cartoons. I subscribed to the full set when it was published in the early '90s
The New Yorker thing is on DVDs
This is a likely a complete set of B.C. cartoons.
This is included to give some idea as to the current storage situation. The books are in approximately 40 boxes. The shed is well made, but it is about 20+ years old. The titles on the boxes name one or two books inside, so I can link it to the photos.
