Bibliophile Issue C309

SISTERS ON BREAD STREET

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That book you couldn't afford, or weren't sure you really wanted, would often still be there on your return trip the following year. Secondhand shops also taught the lesson of the writer who has gone out of fashion. Book-buying certainly consumed more than half of my disposable income. I bought first editions of the writers I most admired: Waugh, Greene, Huxley, Durrell, Betjeman.

I bought first editions of Victorian poets such as Tennyson and Browning neither of whom I had read because they seemed astonishingly cheap.

I collected King Penguins , Batsford books on the countryside , and the Britain in Pictures series produced by Collins in the s and 50s. I bought poetry pamphlets and leather-backed French encyclopaedias published by Larousse; cartoon books and Victorian keepsakes; out-of-date dictionaries and bound copies of magazines from the Cornhill to the Strand. All are still on my shelves, if rarely consulted. Where was the sense in that? So, for instance, because I had admired the few plays of Shaw that I'd seen, I ended up with several feet of his work, even down to obscure pamphlets about vegetarianism.

Since Shaw was so popular, and his print-runs accordingly vast, I never paid much for any of this collection.

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Occasionally, there were thrilling discoveries. I would like to pretend as I occasionally used to that it was my specialist knowledge of Byronic bibliography that led me to spot it. But this would have been to ignore the full pencil note from the bookseller inside the front cover "Cantos I and II appeared in London in July without the name of either author or bookseller in a thin quarto". Just as often, however, I would make serious mistakes. It was a good idea because they were in perfect condition, with fine plates, covers and advertisements. It was a bad idea because one of the parts either the first or last was missing — hence the set's near-affordability.

Then, one day, I found myself at the Lilies in Weedon, Bucks — "by appointment only" — a room Victorian mansion so stuffed with books that a visit occupied most of the day.

Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. It lacked a dustwrapper which was normal — few early Waugh-buyers failed to discard the jackets , but was in pristine condition. The price was … astonishingly low. Then I read a little pencilled note which explained why. It was in the handwriting, and with the signature, of Roger Senhouse , the Bloomsburyite publisher who was Lytton Strachey's last lover.

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The culprit must have arrived chez Senhouse with this copy concealed about him — I assumed it was a he not a she — then managed the switch when no one was in the room. Who could it have been? Might I ever be tempted to such action? Yes, I subsequently was — tempted, that is. And might someone do that to me and my collection one day?

Not as far as I know. More recently, I heard another version of this story, from a different point of view. A reader sent a rather famous living author a copy of an early novel of his one whose first print-run was under a thousand copies , asking for a signature and enclosing return postage.

After a while, a parcel arrived containing the novel, duly signed by the author — except that he had retained the valuable first edition and sent a second impression instead. This manner of acquisition is no longer possible, or no longer makes sense. All those old, rambling, beautifully-sited shops have gone. Collecting has also been changed utterly by the internet. Today, 30 seconds with abebooks.

When the great English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald died, I decided as homage to buy first editions with dustwrappers of her last four novels — the four that established her greatness. This all took less time than it would to find a parking space nowadays near the spot where Beach's bookshop used to exist. And while I could go on about the "romance" and "serendipity of discovery" — and yes, there was romance — the old system was neither time- nor cost-effective.

I became a bit less of a book-collector or, perhaps, book-fetishist after I published my first novel. Perhaps, at some subconscious level, I decided that since I was now producing my own first editions, I needed other people's less. I even started to sell books, which once would have seemed inconceivable.

Not that this slowed my rate of acquisition: I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop. The current pressures on both are enormous.

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The economics seem unanswerable. Yet, fortunately, economics have never entirely controlled either reading or book-buying.

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John Updike, towards the end of his life, became pessimistic about the future of the printed book:. For who, in that unthinkable future When I am dead, will read? The printed page Was just a half-millennium's brief wonder …. I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers — there always were.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader. Nor do I think the e-reader will ever completely supplant the physical book — even if it does so numerically. Books will have to earn their keep — and so will bookshops. Books will have to become more desirable: I have no luddite prejudice against new technology; it's just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. My father's school prizes are nowadays on my shelves, 90 years after he first won them.

I'd rather read Goldsmith's poems in this form than online. The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false as it is when Yeats imagines a choice between "perfection of the life, or of the work".

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. Romance and Romantic Fiction. Signed by the Author. Word Books and Dictionaries. A collector's library bonded leather edition with gold tooling, rope spine, gilded pages, satin bookmarker and gold foil decoration on the burgundy cover, the text is beautifully laid out in the Ca Add to shopping basket. Jacopo will conduct you to Leghorn, where M. Noirtier awaits his granddaughter, whom he wishes to bless Our deluxe, Folio Society-style edition is bound in cream leather with gold tooling, decorative borders, an inset illustration of the ragged child from the publicity for the West End show and film, Little Women, Little Men and Jo's Boys are reproduced in their entirety in this pale pink bonded leather Folio Society-style collectable edition.

The Great Gatsby is rightly regarded as one of the greatest novels written by an American author. Born in , F. Scott Fitzgerald enrolled at Princeton University in and in met Classy and classic, in chocolate brown bonded leather binding with gold and silver tooling and beautiful design, the deerstalker, pipe and magnifying glass, violin and crossed swords are embossed o Folio Society-style and quality, this heavyweight collectable edition is bound in black leather with four rope supports to the spine and an embossed design cover inset with a colourful nebula space Between and , Star Trek split infinitives and boldly journeyed through outer space and into the heart of matters that defined the human condition.

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