T.G.
Rosenthal
I think that my certifiable bibliomania began at 13, when my family moved to Cambridge and David's stall in Cambridge market became my little Mecca. Over the years I realised that the really great books were, and always would be, wildly beyond my purse, so concentrated on modern first editions. As both publisher and book collector, there is a numinous quality for me in handling a book which has in some way influenced modern writing and think- ing, particularly when, if it has been signed, one knows that in its very first form it was actually handled by its creator. Few pleasures exceed the contemplation, hand- ling and even reading (because there are still some publishers who actually read) copy number six, out of the first 100 printed, of Ulysses signed by Joyce.
My two principal obsessions are for the output of the Nonesuch Press (wherel am approaching completion and, if I don't eat and drink too much, ought to achieve it) and, above all, for D.H. Lawrence. Lawr- ence is a bibliophile's dream. Two editions of an immensely scholarly bibliography are now out of print. Even a modest collector like me has at least a dozen books not listed there, and, as I have succumbed to the final stages of the disease, I am deeply, as they say, into variants. Given the number of variants that are listed in Roberts's bibliography and the number that I have found that he doesn't know about, and given the extreme rarity of Certain editions which consisted of as few as three copies, I know that this is the task of a lifetime. I also know that I shall never complete it; thus I am in the enviable position of being able to say that, when I die, I shall die happily frustrated.
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