Yesterday, I spent part of the day, for Labor Day, cleaning out my boiler room. I moved in here in 2016, and there are still boxes I have never gone through. In fact, in shifting everything around so often, I don’t even know where some of the boxes are. Occasionally, I’ll stumble across one squirreled away in the unlikeliest of places.
Allow me to clarify that I ran an antiquarian book business in Philadelphia for 13 years, so it’s not because I’m a common hoarder; I’m a professional one! I’ve also got a storage space that very badly needs to be gone through and closed out. Who knows what’s in some of those boxes.
All this is preamble to stating that yesterday, somewhere in a leaning tower of cardboard against one of the walls, I uncovered a large box labelled “DESK + BEHIND (SIBELIUS).” Hmm, I wonder if this could be, at long last, the box that contains my lost Sibelius photo – the one signed by the composer in 1934 and given to me by his grandson, who, if I understood him correctly, brought it to me from the composer’s home, Ainola? In any case, he brought it back with him from one of his trips to Finland. I washed my hands and thoroughly dried them and began a careful examination of the ark’s contents.
Sure enough, at the bottom of the box, beneath a Lord Dunsany paperback, an edition of “Pinocchio” illustrated by Sergio Leone, and a mountain of bookstore-related papers, I discovered another, smaller box, which contained not only the Sibelius photo, but a few other treasures, including a letter written by Charles Gounod, an autographed photo of Birgit Nilsson, and a first printing, from 1910, of some sheet music from Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s ballet-pantomime “Der Schneemann” (“The Snowman”), written when the composer was 11-years-old.
You never know what you’re going to find when you clean house with Classic Ross Amico!
