Balancing the Books

Financial Times offers up a tale about a man who collects books and can't seem to part with them.

From the piece...


I can trace as many book phases in my past as there are Ages of Man. I learnt the allure of second-hand shops as a teenager. My Yorkshire boarding school did not have an indoor swimming pool, so the swimming team was bused into York on Saturday afternoons for practice. There was usually an hour for pottering about in the bookshops of the Shambles before we were taken back. It was very low-budget collecting, and many of the books I bought then have long since lost their spines but they have been with me far too long to throw away.

At university in the late 1970s, investing in textbooks was a real financial challenge. The Oxford University Press edition of the Complete Works of Chaucer – solidly bound in blue buckram and printed on fine paper – cost me far too much to be discarded when I graduated. It now sits next to a 1975 Faber edition of The Complete Poems and Plays of TS Eliot, which is adorned with the embarrassing marginalia I scribbled (in pencil) as a 20-year-old undergraduate.

A salary meant being able to buy hardback copies of my favourite authors as soon as they came out. Some of these first editions – of Saul Bellow’s later novels, for example – are now valuable, so they certainly cannot go.

The fourth phase came with postings abroad. In the mid-1980s I arrived in Washington as a correspondent for Channel Four News just as American bookshops were making themselves so appealing, offering coffee and a place to read before buying. Those creamy, rough-edged pages that good American publishers use proved irresistible. A spell as Paris correspondent for the BBC offered the temptations of the barrows by the Seine.

Phases five, six and seven have come in a jumble together over the past decade. More and more friends started to publish books of their own. You go to the launch to see old friends, you buy the book and you get it signed – and, of course, you keep it in case the author comes to dinner. Far more serious, in terms of volume, has been the free book phenomenon. While I worked on the Today programme, people sent me books in the hope that I would mention them on air. We often did discussions on the programme that were based on a new book; I would skim it in preparation and then take it with me to read on the journey home after coming off air.