Bill's Bibliophilic Christmas tree

Bill Bracy setting up his Christmas tree

Bill Bracy has the largest private collection of books I've seen outside European monasteries. He covers both definitions of bibliophile: he loves and reads books, and he collects books. He has a nine-volume history of the Netherlands where he and Christine lived twice, and he can read Dutch.  Who does that? Nobody does that, except my mostly dead relatives.

He took most of one day to put this tree together.  There are books in the middle as well as what you see at the edges of the tree.  These are books he had in his basement that had no home on a shelf. Yet.

Christine is good natured about Bill's obsessive collecting, but she does develop a tic if books are stacked on the floor against a wall. So Bill constructed the tree, which puts off building new shelves for another two months. (Of course, by then he'll have a new stack).

There is no cure for him. Eventually she must kill him.

Fortunately, Bill and Christine have a large house with high ceilings and three bathtubs, so he has a little time.  Still it's filling up fast.

But I expect he'll still be around next year at Christmastime to repeat this creative act.