I am halfway through the first folder of transcripts so I will be taking some time to go back and review my work. It’s been an enjoyable challenging to come up with a data schema to encompass these strange works, but I am sure that I missed things. It’s hard to know when a person or detail might be of interest. Too much data can be as bad as too little, so I’ll be taking my time to review and revise.

Since that will mean that I won’t be annotating any new transcripts tonight, I thought I would take the time to more fully explain my current circumstances. I am sure some of my readers will be curious. Old houses stuff with books will do that for most people.

I was contacted some months ago by the lawyer for the estate that is now my temporary residence. I am sure there’s a will with stipulations about what is to become of all of this, though I am not privy to the details. What I do know is that the contents of the house will be liquidated in an estate sale. Contrary to what books and movies make it seem like, settling an estate is a long legal affair that can take years especially when significant assets are involved.

The legal firm that hired me to do the work of cataloging all the literary assets gave me no time line, insisting that accuracy and completeness were more essential than speed in this endeavor. During the day I mainly work in the library, but as I have mentioned there are books scattered everywhere in the house, excepting the servants areas. Every room is locked per the instructions of the estate lawyer.

A couple of times a week Mr. Hardacre will unlock a room for me so that I can examine the contents and bring anything relevant to my work back to the library. There is plenty of work still left to do in the library which looks as though no efforts at organization were ever made, but if I don’t tackle the rooms a few at a time I will feel overwhelmed.

Already I have found books from the same set, Cassell’s Natural History, in three separate locations. Three of them were already in the library. One of them was chest in a spare room. The second one was perched on top of a toilet tank. I am sure I will find the sixth book wedge in a sofa or propping up a stool somewhere. I will say one thing for their owners: It does seem like they actually read their books.

Many of these old estates have libraries stuffed to their coffered ceilings with pristine leather-bound books bought in bulk for the purposes of display and whose covers have never been cracked. Here the books all seem to be well used, with foxed pages and the occasional loose binding. They cover a wide range of topics from history and nature to personal accounts and even some hand-written diaries. The latter seem mostly of little monetary value but I have been carefully recording them so I can research what historic value they might have.

While the books and the library themselves have been a delight, the house is much less so. I cannot reveal too many details because it would be unprofessional, but I think it’s a curious place. The house itself sits on around 150 acres of land, much of which is forest. There are several other buildings on the property, including the caretaker’s cottage, though I don’t know much about them.

The house itself was built in the late 1800s when live-in servants were still the norm but by the 1930s things were changing. The servants area of the house look like they were updated in the 1950s but the rest of the house still contains much of the older style furniture, with wallpapered walls and dark woodwork throughout. The house itself is a brick monstrosity with towers on the corners of the front of the house. Curiously one of the towers is round and the other is square which gives it a slightly unsettling asymmetry.

It was not my first choice to be staying here. I was looking forward to retreating back to the nearby town each night, away from the gloomy mansion. As far as I know, the only people here at night are Mr. Hardacres who lives in the caretaker’s cottage somewhere on the property and myself, the house’s sole resident. Mrs. Mundy lives in town and only comes once a week. I am thankful that I have no reason to go up the stairs in the evenings.

The library and the sitting room are the only places I am allowed on my own outside of the kitchen and the servants quarters which are all on the same floor. When I pass by the staircase in the main entrance on my way to the back rooms, the darkness at the top of the stairs and the height of the ceilings make me feel exposed. The massive chandelier wrapped in a grey dust cloth always seems to catch me off guard in the evening shadows, as though there’s something on the ceiling waiting to drop on me.

I don’t know if anyone will even read this blog, but it makes me feel less alone. It’s a morbid thought, I know, but I feel like it’s important that someone knows I am here alone in this house in the woods; like someone knowing I am here means someone would notice if I suddenly were not.