An odd addition to be books of special interest. I got these three little booklets at the annual yard sale for The Little Sisters of the Poor. If you go during the last hour of the last day of the sale you get everything you can stuff in a bag for only $5. So I wind up getting some odd things.
This last year I scooped up this booklets, which I thought were about Gandhi. Turns out they were written by Gandhi. They are part of a series. I have numbers 3, 6 and 22. My favorite is #3, THE MORAL BASIS OF VEGETARIANISM, in which Gandhi expounds the virtues of avoid animal foods, but also explains that maintaining your health is also important. To this end he repeatedly defends his consumption of goat's milk.
That points out the biggest surprise from these booklets. They are all reasonable. Gandhi explains and understands the difference between the ideal and the reality. The way politics and religion work in this country it's surprising to see reasonableness applied to both.
However, what really puts my personal value of these booklets over the top is the inscription. No, they aren't signed by Mr. Gandhi, nor the editor nor the publisher. Each one has the identical inscription:
To Mrs. Katherine Movius
with kind regards
M.Shastri
3.7.62
The signature isn't very clear, but it looks like Shastri to me, which according to Wikipedia is a title meaning scholar. So it's hard to know who really signed the things. I tried looking up the recipient but Katherine Movious is a surprisingly common name. No matter. I think the mystery of who these people were is as Important to me as the booklets themselves.
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