Unpacking Books

Still unpacking boxes of books. It’s curious that, whether I packed the boxes, or the moving service’s packers packed the boxes, you’d think that boxes would be packed and stacked in a relative order to what was on the shelves. And then moved onto the moving van, in relatively the same order. And then unmoved from the van into my garage, in relatively the same order. But no. In my second or third week of unpacking boxes that were moved into the garage of our new home… I’m finding them in almost random order. (Not quite.) As I’ve unpacked boxes of ‘main sequence’ books — those novels and collections by particular authors — in the past couple weeks, and then unpacking boxes of anthologies in the past three days, I find odd gaps: I’m missing the early Dozois best-of-year anthologies (the six Dutton, and first six Bluejay/St. Martin’s volumes); almost all the Best of F&SF anthologies (in small paperbacks, SFBC editions, and later Van Gelder volumes), and the first 8 Nebula Awards anthologies, which I only have in paperback. Did I use them as fillers in boxes of digest magazines that I packed? Don’t remember; but haven’t found boxes of these, and haven’t opened the boxes of magazines yet (not sure where to put them, in our smaller house).