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Thursday, May 17, 2018

Wargaming Regrets (I've had a few)

I'm sure we all have a few of them, but was just thinking this morning of one of my biggest hobby regrets.

It goes way back to when I was at university. I was a repressed wargamer at the time and a post-grad student - the two may in fact have borne some relation to each other - but however that was, being a graduate student had certain privileges, and I found out on a particular Friday what one of them was.

We were greeted this morning with a note in the common room inviting us to visit room X on the Xteenth floor of the university library that afternoon.  It turned out that a retired professor from the university had passed away and bequeathed his enormous collection of books to the university library. Those that could not be used were to be given to the graduate students, and so we were allowed to go and look over the collection and take from there any books that we might want.

When we arrived we saw a room absolutely chocker-block with books. It was like the best used book store you've ever seen: literature, history, classical studies, languages, religious studies, reference materials; it was a goldmine of the humanities. I found a banana box and spent a memorable hour or so wandering around and filling it up. When I was about ready to leave (and sweating under the weight of these glorious gifts), I saw on one shelf a complete set of the Cambridge Ancient History.

It looked a bit like this:



I had used the CAH a lot during my undergrad years and it was an amazing resource. I thought about it, but decided not to take them. Although I was still doing some classical study at the time, I was more of a literature man by then and felt it would be greedy to take them all and that someone from the Classics department would no doubt get better use out of them than I would.

Still, it was with a slightly sorrowful step that I turned away and went out the door.

Well, fast-forward eight years to 2005 when I was becoming a proper wargamer focused mainly on the Roman Republican era and eager for any information I could find, how I kicked myself for not having picked that set up.

But the thing that's haunted me most about it was that unbeknownst to us the unclaimed books from that lot were to be chucked away, and I don't know if the Classics students even got a chance to have a look through.

 I do hope that someone somewhere saved them from the fire!



11 comments:

  1. That was a lost opportunity. I surely hope that they didn’t throw away any untaken books. There must have been some treasures in there (other than CAH, that is) that it would be a crime to destroy.

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    1. Yes, it certainly was a lost opportunity! There were a lot of gems in that collection.

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  2. Oh no! I do hope someone picked them up!

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    1. If it had happened last year some enterprising person would have brought a truck and made a small fortune on Ebay!

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  3. I had a similar feeling about Gardiner's history of the ECW & Protectorate, which I saw for next to nothing in a 2nd hand book shop. I didn't buy them, regretted it, went back and they were gone.

    Luckily a few years ago I saw a paperback set in another 2nd hand shop. Didn't make the same mistake twice.

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    1. I'm glad you got to remedy the initial oversight! I can't complain on the whole (I've been very lucky with right place right time in the hobby) but this was the one that got away!

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  4. I followed a similar path as you, Aaron. I was more of a Fantasy guy or perhaps WW2 and Napoleonics. I wouldn't of cared about those books either given a similar opportunity. No need to kick yourself. It's just the way it turned out. Besides, more modern scholarship has shed even more light on the subject than even the Cambridge Ancient History set could deliver.

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    1. True John, but I do can't help the occasional 'd'oh!' when I think of it!

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  5. What? I did not expect how the story would turn out. I thought, yes! Eight years later you were reunited with said books. What a sorrowful end instead.

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    1. I'll have to do a 'great finds' post as well to balance things out, Kevin!

      Cheers,
      Aaron

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    2. Please do sir, I am still dabbing at my eyes with a handkerchief.

      Seriously though, yes you must, an excellent idea!!!

      Cheers
      Kevin

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