I have recently been enjoying the book Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney. My original plan was to mention it at the end of one of my posts, saying something like “This has nothing to do with hledger, but…”
However, I asked myself, does it really have nothing to do with hledger?
And the answer was that it has enough for more than one blog entry. The first, for this week, will talk about the book itself. I mean the physical book. Later, it will be the story itself and how it relates to hledger.
First: the physical book itself. To start with, you can search all my transactions, and the purchase of this book will never appear. This is because I got the book from one of the Little Free Libraries in our neighborhood, hence no cost. My first point is that there are things that are worth having, and have no cost to you. They don’t appear on your balance sheet in plain text accounting, but they nevertheless add value to your life.
I didn’t purchase the book, but someone else paid for it (even if it was just the cost for priting the book). If whoever paid for the book used hledger, they would have likely recorded the purchase in proper hledger format. So, my second point is that an expense that you incur may be beneficial to someone else. Here the expense appears on the balance sheet of the purchaser. The buyer gets some value for their money spent, and others get value without any additional expense.
Finally, because of mass market printing, many more of us can purchase such a book than a thousand years ago when books needed to be copied by hand. Only the wealthy minority could afford to buy books in centuries past. The same story of Beowolf that was once a significant expense can now be an impulse purchase. My final point, then, is that value doesn’t depend on cost. Therefore, the amount that you see as an expense on your spending report is not necessarily a reflection of its value.
Next week, I will look inside the book. How can anything in the centuries old story of Beowulf have anything to do with hledger? Stay tuned. But first a word from this week’s sponsor.
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