It was a cold day during the Idaho spring, my friend and I had recently picked up my sister from the air port and decided to go around Boise shopping for a bit. Going to Boise was a luxury my family could rarely afford, after all. The thrift store there beckoned to us; the Idaho Youth Ranch.
When we had arrived it was the most peculiar building; one part warehouse, one part store, two parts confusing parking lot. After entering the building a surprise in the form of a number of hardly sorted bins for shelves and and the ‘junk’ within their merchandise. Having wandered around for a bit we stumbled on a bin with a plethora of books and decided to take a look.
There within was a treasure trove of knowledge, at times of peculiar subject. You could dig your hands in and grab a book about the Freemasonry, the Vatican, and the Communist’s plan to destroy America, or perhaps reach in again and find a book about the USMC, or dig even deeper and a book about Hitler wider than a tractor tire. The odd thing was: they seemed connected, and just as we had that thought a man had walked up and declared “These are all from one library, the old guy had a whole bunch of weird books; even had his own rubber stamp.” It was then we opened one of the books to find they were indeed right, almost every book in that bin was stamped the following:
A quick google search reveals nothing, and while the bin had even included his personal files and photographs of his VFW unit there was not enough to determine who really was the eccentric man known as Joe Surace. A quick look of his library reveals to you that he likely fought in the Vietnam War, hated freemasons, Muslims, and perhaps immigrants, had books on the Nazis, (though, i do not believe he was a nazi because he included newspaper snippets that disproved hitler’s rhetoric, more on that later) a number of books from right wing speakers, books about the Habsburgs, Ottomans, and a great many other books.
The man was so dedicated to his studies that he highlighted parts of every book religiously and included newspaper snippets that were relevant. In fact, he was so knowledgeable, that in his copy of “Mormonism and Freemasonry” he was able to point out that in a 1958 (approx.) reprint of the book they had removed a paragraph about polygamy, and was happy enough with this revelation that he had marked on the front to check that page.
I think one of the most interesting aspects to this story was that he clearly had intended others to read books from his library, perhaps his children or grandchildren, and that’s why he religiously highlighted aspects he thought were important, left guides for people to better navigate the books, and newspaper snippets to provide greater context to the situation or topic at hand. I do not think, however, that he expected his family to donate the entirety of his collection after his death, but maybe the previous signs were meant for the people who got his books after he donated them (maybe a public library?) but there’s no way to know for sure: dead men don’t speak.
I don’t think that he was expecting to have his collection ridiculed and his character insulted by people looking through his eccentric collection for the peculiar titles mentioned. Surace was no doubt a bigoted man, but certainly a well learned one; and it truly would of been interesting to speak to him.
The quote from Dionysius Cato that he religiously stamped into most the books starts to make sense: How many people can claim to have a fraction of his library? How many people would be willing to even bother getting a few books let alone the great number he had amassed?