Intro

One morning about six weeks ago I was sitting in a hotel not far from the Capitol Hill Books storage unit outside Winchester, Virginia, putting together the weekly rare book e-list and obsessively checking on the wellbeing of Punch the tragic monkey when my sister-in-law Cori texted me. For some reason she was rereading some old Substack posts I had written a few years ago for the Cap Hill account. “Who’s David G.?” she asked. He seemed to have posted comments on everything I wrote. “Is he my law school friend David Goldberg?”

I told her I’d never heard of or met David Goldberg so why would he have written “You’re the best. Keep writing” on my Substack post? I then reminded her that David G. was my Dad. Dad passed away almost eighteen months ago and unfortunately by the time he wrote that comment I wasn’t able to put much store in anything he said to me. Kind and encouraging or cruel and dismissive, he didn’t sound like himself. But revisiting that message now brought back that raw, wounded feeling I had when he first died and I found myself writing down pages and pages to try and preserve every last detail of his final days so they wouldn’t disappear from my memory. When I got that out of my system, I abruptly stopped writing, though I kept thinking about it, like I think about him, interminably.

So I’m going to try writing again. I will probably write a lot about rare books and the day-to-day business of co-managing the CHB Rare Book Department as it continues to expand. I will probably also indulge in a lot of navel gazing. Tomorrow’s first big post will have a lot of both. Whatever it turns out to be, this Substack is dedicated to the memory of David G.