YOU’VE EARNED IT
Fully booked
Simon Heffer on why he’s never lost for words Educational psychologists say that if a boy sees his father reading books, he will want to have and read books too. Perhaps that is my problem. My father was always reading. His library was packed with the middle-brow fiction of the 1920s and 1930s — Wodehouse, Sapper and Dornford Yates — but also laden with Dickens, the staple of his childhood, and the picaresque novels of the 18th century that amused him Smollett, Fielding and the rest. As soon as I had money to spend I bought the books that interested me but were not in his collection mainly, in my teens, on cricket, but also 20thcentury history, whose only hold on him was in the military history of both wars. I made two rules early on: I bought only what I was determined to read, and I read what I bought — all the way to the end, however painful that might have been.
By the time I went to Cambridge I had acquired another annoying habit: I disliked borrowing books from libraries. I have always been fastidious about books, and grieved if I have ever accidentally caused any damage to one. Reading a library book, even one undamaged by those to whom it had been lent, was painful: these fine objects were always smothered in ugly municipal or institutional stamps, which I would no more do to them than to a painting hanging in a public gallery. Also, I found that if I read a book I usually wanted to have it to refer to days, weeks or years later: and if it was miles away in some library, that was impossible. As a result of these preposterous traits, a higherthen-sensible proportion of my disposable income has been spent on books for the best part of the last 30 years: and I have never sold one, thrown or given one away.
In the early 1990s, thanks to the Lamont economic miracle, we were able to buy a large house that most other times would have been way beyond our means. I immediately commandeered the largest room for my library. Every wall that could be shelved was shelved: and a butler's pantry adjoining it was annexed for those large and difficult to accommodate volumes, such as the Oxford English Dictionary. To my dismay the room was threequarter filled almost at once. Now things are near crisis point. Every shelf is full, and books are laid scruffily on top of books. Some of the fiction has been shipped out to spare bedrooms, and some of the topography to another downstairs room. The problem has always been that if I want books on a certain subject, I want all of them, and I cannot read one book without finding in the bibliography three or four more that I must read too. So, as one with an obsessive interest in architecture, I have a complete run of Pevsner, including the revised editions, not to mention scores of other architectural tomes. I have all but four of the 143 Wisdens. For reference purposes and for some years I worked mainly from home, and therefore needed a serious library — there is a complete DNB, and the Oxford history, as well as the OED in the cupboard. In the days before the internet one at least had to spend years hunting in secondhand shops for what one wanted: now you can usually find it in a few clicks of the mouse.
Collecting for its own sake was not my initial aim, but some choices do appear to have been fortunate. Because I adored the Brian Cook dustwrappers I have about 150 Batsford books in first editions, items that were easy to pick up in the early 1980s when I started to collect them, but are becoming like hen's teeth now. Since I travel often I have hundreds of old Everymans and World’s Classics, because they are supremely portable. There is a huge 19th-century section, because I once wrote a book on Thomas Carlyle. And, because of what I have to do for a living, I have what seems like almost every political biography ever written, and every diary too. For pleasure there are literary histories and biographies and diaries, works of philosophy, shelves of musical books and yards of travel and topography; and, for exotic variation, novels and non-fiction in French and (a particular pride and joy) a set of old Guides Bleus not merely for France, but for much of Europe.
Most weeks two or three books will arrive for review. There are then many reorganisations and shiftings of books to new piles or different rooms, but none of this can avert the inevitable showdown that must one day come. I can't cull, because it would be like an amputation. These books are, outside my own flesh and blood, the most precious things I have. We have a decent-sized utility room at the back of the house that has possibilities as an overflow, but that would cause marital difficulties. There is plenty of space to build on to the house, but we are circumscribed by big and ancient trees. One of our sycamores has sooty bark disease, and will have to come down. It might infect one other tree, which is blocking the obvious extension to the house. I love trees almost as much as I love books, but should this sycamore have to go it would, indeed, be an ill wind that fails to blow some relief to my book problem.
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