Retention List Stories

Story Thirty: The Two Certainties: Death and Taxes

Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. Here is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.

Some of the books on the WSU retention list deal with death, and some deal with taxes. Regarding death, a book in the medical section lists some of its causes. In the tax department, WSU owns a forty-volume version of the land survey created after the Norman Conquest called the Domesday Book. This survey facilitated the collection of taxes in eleventh century England. (And, with a name like the Domesday Book, it sounds like it would be about death.)

Carrington, Hereward. Death, Its Causes and Phenomena. Arno Press, 1977.

Domesday Book. 40 volumes. 1983 ed., Phillimore, 1983.