For The Love Of Books
I don’t know when I first fell in love with books. I don’t mean fell in love with reading. I think that is an easier question to answer. I read Vote For Richard when I was about six or seven years old. The story tells of a boy, Richard, and his friends who protested for children’s rights and won a vote in Parliament. I was inspired by the adventure of this young neophyte activist for justice (interestingly that theme has continued to captivate my attention). Next, I remember Emil And The Detectives by Erich Kastner catching my imagination, in the post war streets of Berlin. Around that time emerged the romanticised schoolboy world of Jennings and Derbyshire by Anthony Buckeridge, which led me to my exhaustive journey through the complete works of Malcolm Saville and the adventures of the Lone Pine Club. Most of the books were set in real locations across the UK and I dragged my family to as many locations as they could bear. By pre-teens the road was set and the reading adventure has continued to this day. Like a great detective story, each book I have read has been unearthed by a comment from someone here, a reference in another book there, a recommendation from a friend here, a footnote in an essay there, hearing an inspiring speaker here and pursuing a curiosity there. But when did I fall in love with books? The actual joy of the pure physicality of a book. And what was it about that physicality that was so soul-enriching?
Around my mid-teens I would visit the small bookshop in my home town. To access the books, you had to sidle down a side alley of the high street and climb up the ten steps, before dropping down another two steps into the bookshop itself. The building had a mystique about it because it had originally been the home of Edward Bright (1721-1750), who at 47.5 stones was historically known as The Fat Man Of Maldon, the largest man to ever have lived in the UK. Unsurprisingly he died at 29 years old. The book shop was tiny, two small rooms, compared to the cavernous world of modern-day Waterstones or Blackwells, but it was womb-like in its attraction and comfort. The owner always sat at his small desk opposite the entrance door, busy cataloguing books, but conveying that perfect blend of welcome and permission to browse with no pressured expectation of buying anything. It was there that I discovered the joy of simply looking at and touching books.
What is a book? Pulped trees, squashed flat into paper and printed on with words of black ink. Some books were thin, like Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose, some hard covered poetry books with pages of words, so widely spaced apart that the book could have been ten times smaller – except it couldn’t (I learned the beauty of the white space between words). I’m thinking of discovering Rod McKuens poems at 16 and arguing with my school’s deputy head (Cambridge English graduate) as to whether it was real poetry at all. I said it definitely was and he said it was adolescent dribble. I learned the creativity of book covers and that you cannot judge a book by its cover when I was seduced into buying End Of A Summers Day (now well out of print) by a tantalisingly erotic cover and discovering that there was nothing erotic about the content at all.
The feel of the book, the smell, the newness, the feeling that within these covers lay a world undiscovered, but begging me to come and find it. Knowledge, wisdom, inspiration, tragedy (I bought and read Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman from that little book shop and cried at what I was reading), beauty, love and yes, eroticism. People had found a way of saying what I wanted to say, or going on adventures that I wanted to go on (Robin Lee Graham’s Dove), explored ideas and geographies of land and heart that I had not yet explored. Bookshops were like visiting restaurants with a vast menu. I discovered Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upwards totally by ‘accident’, deep in the basement of Oxford’s Blackwells, simply because the spine of the book caught my eye. The Last Time I Saw Paris(Paul Elliot) was sold to me by the eerie cover, as it lay on a book table at Wyken Vineyard, in the depths of Suffolk. Every spine, every cover, every first touch, first flick through, said ‘here is a meal – feed on me’ and like a restaurant menu, something instinctual within me said, ‘I want this’, or ‘I don’t want this’, or ‘make a note of this because you will be hungry for it sometime in the future’.
I long ago stopped worrying about the criticism of the danger of just being a collector of books, rather than a reader of them. Books are ideas, inspirations, scents of something more, or deeper. They increase my knowledge, or put words to my experiences, or seduce me into labyrinths of new learning. I pay money for books even if they give me one priceless sentence. I don’t need them to give me value for every page. They are a buffet or an a la carte, not Prix Fixe. Bookshops, the tasting of books, is like an artist gathering up endless tubes of paint – some I know I need a lot of right now, others need to be in my studio because I know that I will need them one day and others are there for a tiny squeeze today, but will be returned to at a later date to empty the whole tube.
Do I use Kindle? Yes, of course. I can’t carry a hundred books onto a plane for a vacation or work assignment. But nothing will ever replace the grounding experience, the soul-elevating delight of easing a book off a shelf, taking a look at it, like smelling the bouquet of a fine wine and then opening it up……and drinking.