I was just upstairs sanding the walls where we had torn down the wallpaper and patched some divots, and well…I got bored…as one does when sanding a wall by hand alone on a windy Saturday afternoon.
Every now and then when I get bored, I go stare at our attic. I like to imagine the space it could one day be. Sometimes I do this from the top of the stairs looking into the entire space, and sometimes, like today, I do this by getting on my hands and knees and looking into every crack I can find.
For some reason, there is a gap underneath each of the four doorways that are in our attic. Instead of thresholds, there are just holes ranging in width from an inch to about three inches wide, and always the length of the doorway. Today I turned on the flashlight on my phone an shined it down each of the holes, wondering if they would tell me anything about how high we could raise the ceilings on the main floor. Mostly there was dust and debris from when we had the roof done. But in one absent threshold there was just a hint of something that looked like it might not just be broken floor slats. In fact, it looked bookish.
With my left hand clutching my phone flashlight, I gingerly reached my right index and middle fingers down into the gap and pinched the binding. Of course the book was hiding beneath one of the one inch gaps, so this felt like a higher-stakes game of Operation. If I dropped it, the book would likely slip all the way down between the walls of the first floor. I held my breath, shifted my grip, and slowly pulled the book out.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, 1894. It’s fabric bound and honestly not in bad shape for being nearly 130 years old!
How freakin’ cool is that?
And yes, I already checked: it’s worth between $18 and $40, so I think we’ll just keep this little treasure to ourselves.