Revamping my Tolkien and Middle-earth Memorabilia Collection: Ravel’s Bolero and LibraryThing

After another of many moves and the fact that the COVID-19 crisis has changed all of our lives I remembered a wonderful blog post by Tim Spalding, LibraryThing Founder and President, from March 18th, 2020 called ‘LibraryThing Is Now Free to All.’ For those of you who don’t know LT is a ‘social cataloging web application’ (thanks, WP_EN) with which you can easily build up a database of your collection. In this case I am talking about my Tolkien and Middle-earth Memorabilia Collection. I first met LT many, many moons ago and I added 56 books only to realise I didn’t know whether I wanted to continue – it wasn’t quite easy enough to do things back then but today, with an Android app and the opportunity to search the Library of Congress catalogue, Amazon.com books, the German Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund (GBV), and the British Library for any item in their collection so you can add a copy of their information into your database it’s really quite beautiful. And then there was Ravel’s Bolero.

London Symphony Orchestra* Conducted By Yan-Pascal Tortelier* ‎– Bolero
℗ & © 1993 Kenwest / Disky. Marketing in Europe by Kenwest / Disky.

Now, you might like to know – if at all – why this particular CD is of any importance?

Mere chance brought it to my attention. I was fed up with not doing anything about my collection (which to a certain extent is still in boxes or strewn wildly across shelves and floor space) and when I realised that I wanted to do something about it and order it via the Dewey Decimal Classification I knew I had to start somewhere. I had just unpacked a box including, among other things, my First Night VHS of Braveheart (yes, I used to live in Scotland and queued up starting midnight in my Aberdeen VHS store of choice to get the tape including stills from the film), four of the six DVD collections of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, shoes and a large number of my CDs.

At the time of writing the London Symphony Orchestra has moved into Scenes From Romeo And Juliet – Ballet by Prokofiev and I have to say I quite feel the atmosphere there. It is a great CD and if you ever wanted to know anything about this particular recording which was published in 1993 but digitally recorded at EMI studios, Abbey Road, 15th & 16th January 1985, you should hop on over to its Discogs entry.

The Tolkienist’s Tolkien and Middle-earth Memorabilia Collection is coming to LibraryThing – and I am coming to Patreon

Yup. That is the long and short of it. I have been thinking about starting a Patreon account for quite some time and thanks to the COVID-19-related consequences to my professional life I will try and supplement my daily income with some great content on J.R.R. Tolkien’s life and works as well as related fields. And getting my collection in order and publicly available to you all is one of the many projects starting this May 2020. It may happen in leaps and bounds – that, it certainly will – but I will let you know about the things coming up here with TheTolkienist.com.

Be there or be square! Like this Bolero!

P.S. Does Ravel have anything to do with Tolkien? Will Marcel ever answer this question? When will I found out?

I’ll let you know!

Oh, and here is the link to my LibraryThing profile page. As far I can I tell I first started using LT on October 5th, 2012. It’s been some time.