Love Me, Love My Books

 This week has been my birthday, and my husband Richard gave me ‘Ex Libris – Confessions of a Common Reader’ by Anne Fadiman. This collection of essays about the love of books made me reflect on my own attachment to my book collection. Why don’t other objects – CDs, or clothes, for example – have the same emotional significance?

When I moved in with Richard, I brought my goods and chattels with me: half a set of cast-iron pans (the other half stayed with my ex), a dinner service (a twenty-first birthday present), and books – lots and lots of books. Over the months that followed, as we decided that this was to be a permanent arrangement, I parted with my duplicate colander (his was nicer) and my grater (ditto) and my sofa (too uncomfortable).  The books, however, stayed. All of them.

My books are old friends, they are travelling companions. There are the books I have studied, laboriously; identifiable by the worn spine, the margin notes and the underlines. These are the books I could, at one time, quote at length, and whose themes, narrative technique and characterisation I have written about till I never wanted to read them again (at least, not for a while).  We are like veterans of a war, these volumes and I. We have seen action, and we bear the scars.

There are those books I bought (often second hand) in a fit of academic enthusiasm, because they constituted ‘reading around the text’. These are obscure collections of essays, or historical texts, books on myths and legends, or biographies.  I have carted them around, they have survived six house-moves and numerous ruthless clear-outs, yet most of them remain unread.  I can’t part with them. To do so would be to admit defeat.

Then there are the books I just love, that I have read over and over, the stories that have stayed with me. These I might lend to a trusted fellow reader, (after writing my name inside the cover), but I welcome their return like the prodigal son. To part with these would be to reject an old friend.

Richard looks perplexed. ‘Why do you have two copies of ‘Sons and Lovers’? Surely one can go?’

Ah! No!’ I exclaim, and launch into an earnest explanation of how this later edition is significantly longer than this, earlier, version, and is arguably truer to Lawrence’s original intention. Both, therefore, are vital. Richard’s eyes glaze over and he pushes them back onto the shelf.

There are similar, equally valid reasons for keeping the ‘Complete Works of Jane Austen’ as well as most of the novels in separate volumes (the complete works is too heavy for everyday use). And for duplicates of Yeats, Joyce, Tennyson, Hardy…. I could go on.

Now, with two children, the collection is growing exponentially. Books have a whole new emotional significance – how can I possibly part with the chewed board edition of ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ that we’ve shared together until we both know it by heart? The boys have inherited my attachment to duplicate volumes. We have two ‘Complete Thomas the Tank Engine’ collections, containing identical stories and illustrations.  We need both - the volume is part of the request – ‘‘Gordon the Big Engine’ from the red book please!’ I cannot resist the draw of a box-set, so we must find room for ‘The Complete Roald Dahl’ or several yards of ‘Famous Five’. Despite the lure of the internet, the boys love ‘information books’, weighty hardbacks called ‘1000 Amazing Facts’ or ‘How Things Work’ – these also must be accommodated.

When a bookcase is full, new volumes are slotted in at the top, horizontally. They pile up on bedside tables, or at the side of the sofa.  I have tried to enforce a ‘one in, one out’ policy on myself, but to no avail. In desperation I have resorted to a Kindle, so book purchases take up only ‘virtual’ space. 

However, Richard still buys real books for me. By his own admission, he is not a big reader of fiction. But he chooses thoughtful, luxurious reference volumes -  ‘The Oxford Companion to English Literature’, for example, and a ‘Dictionary of Phrase and Fable’ - both glossy tomes which take up an extravagant amount of space on the shelves.  He has given me serious, thought-provoking books, indulgent, escapist books and downright silly books.

I’m off  to read some more of my birthday present, as I reflect that, despite our double-stacked, groaning shelves, my husband still buys me books.  That’s love, that is.