Jon Noble sent along
This Odd Story The late Alexander MacDonald. They say books were the one enduring obsession that helped define his life, he managed to create a private collection which, at its peak, consisted of close to two million titles.
It\’s the biggest private book collection in Australia.
Taken as a whole, they are a map of the country\’s popular reading tastes since the 1940s.
MacDonald\’s family, however, are less than enthralled by this grand, unwieldy inheritance. The collection, they say, is \”jinxed\”.
The roll call of misadventures is startling. MacDonald was felled by his passion in 1997, dying at 84 of a strangulated hernia, the result of a lifetime of picking up boxes of old books.
Recent Comments