THROWING THE BOOK

All my life I have loved books, my own, my parents’, those in school, university or other libraries and those I have borrowed and failed to return to friends. I love browsing in book-stores and unfailingly nose around used book stalls at fetes or at quirky Hay-on-Wye and around the bouquinistes which are still such a distinctive feature of the Seine promenades in Paris. Yet the book, a fixed certainty in life for centuries, is, I am told, in terminal decline. Magazines and newspapers are rapidly going digital if they have not already collapsed and we are asked gradually to accept the joyless if convenient substitute of an e-book. Part of my world is tumbling down.

 

A lovely Stack of books

An irresistible Paris Bouquiniste

This cataclysmic change is first effecting reference books. My dear mother acquired an Encyclopaedia Britannica in about 1935 quite cheaply with cash and coupons in the newspaper circulation wars of that decade. I later bought my own set in about 1980 in 30 handsome leather-bound volumes of which I am inordinately proud. But, horror of horrors, Britannica is no longer published in book form. Nobody needs it anymore when they can conjure up Wikipedia free at the click of a mouse – maybe not so comprehensive but okay for most purposes. My father, not himself much of a reader, received business gifts of leather-bound Whitakers Almanac, Black’s Medical Dictionary (a mine of alarming information for his children!), a Legal Dictionary and a tome on Gardening, but all will now have yielded to the all-conquering broadband.

I know I am whistling in the wind, but books are not just about the information they impart or the tales they tell. There is a tactile element too; the weight of the tome, the quality of the binding and the rustle of the pages; sometimes there is even an aroma to enjoy redolent of ancient wisdom amid the faint scent of mildew.

Of course the main pleasure lies in the content. In my Scottish prep school library, one progressed from Enid Blyton (how we loved her!), to Percy C F Westerman, G E Henty and Biggles (“rattling good yarns”). I did not much care for the sets of Arthur Ransome with his Swallows and Amazons series or Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories but we all devoured John Buchan, especially the Richard Hannay books. I recall, as if it were yesterday, the frisson of terror I felt aged about 11, when in The 39 Steps Hannay returns to his flat to find his unexpected house-guest Scudder “skewered to the floor”. More specific horrors were eagerly lapped up with Edgar Allen Poe’s stories – The Pit and the Pendulum and The Premature Burial were particular favourites! Excitements galore tumbled from Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond thrillers with villainous Carl and Irma Petersen and of course Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes enthralled, often beginning portentously “Never in the annals of crime……”

Watson and Holmes confer

The library at my Edinburgh public school was more serious – only classic novels, lots on literature and history (Victorian sets of Carlyle and Ruskin); many hours were profitably spent there. It will have changed out of all recognition: I particularly cherished an anthology called The Limits of Art reproducing pieces which some critic claimed was “the best lyric poem/epigram/character description etc.” since sliced bread. Some of the judgments were eccentric, but for about 50 years I tried to track it down and buy my own copy. Last year Amazon came up trumps – it is an American book collected and edited by one Huntington Cairns and it is now by my bedside.

The uninspiring New Bodleian, Oxford

 

Delightful Radcliffe Camera

When I was briefly a student in Paris, I borrowed many books from the welcoming British Council library there. An earnest-minded fellow, I read Donne’s Sermons (great stuff) and William Law’s 1729 Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. It will surprise none of my friends when I declare that I did not respond to this Call!

 Libraries at Oxford were hives of industry and books were delivered to your place on a trolley, never to be removed. The main library I used was the forbidding New Bodleian, built by normally excellent Giles Gilbert Scott on an off-day in the 1930s. It is to re-open in 2014, renovated, as the Weston Library, named after the Canadian flour milling and grocery mogul Garfield Weston (he once owned Fortnums!) whose Foundation philanthropically donated £25m to the project. I studied economics and philosophy there, diving deep into Keynes or Kant, then reading someone on what Keynes or Kant really meant, and then someone on what those commentators really meant: ah, the joys of scholarship!  Much the most elegant Oxford library, where I studied political history, was The Radcliffe Camera, designed by my fellow-Aberdonian, James Gibbs, although I did not need its books to tell me that Harold MacMillan was a devious old codger or that JFK was a fine speaker but a political innocent.

Like all my contemporaries, I read and bought books continually. I ended up with yards of books and shelf-space became an issue. Getting rid of books is a painful but necessary exercise. On moving house from the Cotswolds in 2006, I packed my son’s car with 10 large boxes of books and he found a dealer to take them in London “Rather 1960s” he sniffed, accurately enough. I still have far too many and quite a few will end up in the skip. I still have a copy of The Good Book for form’s sake but I can do without decidedly grumpy Jehovah striking down some luckless King of Judah who has offended him by failing to offer sufficiently lavish sacrifices, or to follow the tedious peregrinations of St Paul – I do wish he would drop anchor and stop moving, the fanatical old fidget!

In my dotage, I surround myself with favourite books, many of which I re-read. I like books I can dip into and which make me laugh, so I have lots of P G Wodehouse, Arthur Marshall, Gore Vidal and H L Mencken, supplemented by some Dickens and Mark Twain and the diaries of Boswell, Chips Channon and Lees-Milne. A newer generation can economise with e-books and no doubt carry a thousand titles in a compact I-Pad. I am of the old school and like a book upon which I can stub my toe, toss disdainfully into the waste-paper basket or inscribe with an encouraging message as I pass it down a generation.

SMD

11.11.13

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013

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