Book-keeping

Books are my greatest weakness and collecting them and other printed material is something I have done all of my life. I still spend several hours a week wandering around in bookshops, and the reason I’m late for appointments in Cambridge is that I have a flat above a bookseller with a large stock of remaindered and second-hand books. My passion for the printed word began soon after I learnt to read and the first of my purchases was a second-hand comic book bought for one penny. Serious contact with books came later when I joined the Carnegie Public Library in Germiston, near Johannesburg, and especially when, after the age of 11, I was allowed to read and borrow from the adult section. I used to visit my uncle’s shop in Fordsburg and found a nearby shop that sold second-hand copies of American science fiction magazines. I began collecting Amazing Stories and later followed this with science fiction paperbacks. Like many of my other books from this period, their pages are now yellow. Of course, all the wonder of these books was ruined once NASA finally reached the moon. The modern generation reads and buys books on a computer screen. I tried the latter once to find an out-ofprint book, but never again. I was not allowed to browse and kept on getting demands for the details of my credit card. By browsing, I mean wandering around from shelf to shelf, picking out a book and reading some of the pages. Even if a dotcom allowed me do this, I would still feel unsatisfied because being physically in a bookshop and actually handling books is an essential part of the pleasurable activity. A visitor once asked me whether I had read all of the books I have on my shelves. I confessed I had only read most of them, not all, but that some I had read more than once to make up the average. Those that remain unread have been acquired through either insufficient browsing or seduction by a bargain price. I intend to read these books in my next retirement, when I promise myself and others that I will get all of my letters and papers in order, sort my books and dispose of those that I should, but can’t bear to, get rid of. I have acquired some of my books in an interesting way. In 1979, when I was in hospital and later at home recovering from the aftermath, I suffered from insomnia. To fill the time, I spent hours listening to the radio. In between listening to a live commentary of the attempted coup in Spain, I heard a series of talks, entitled Promenades, by a historian of France, Richard Cobb. I found his views of provincial France fascinating and as soon as I could get to a bookshop I bought the printed version of his talks as well as several other books by him. However, I decided that I would leave one of the books, A Second Identity, for a later purchase. This was a mistake and one that I, as a veteran book browser, should have been the first to recognise. The rule is: always buy the book when you see it, because there will be another book-hunter who will get it if you don’t. When I returned some time later to get it, the book was no longer there. I tried ordering it but discovered that it was out of print and unobtainable. So I had to settle for borrowing it from the Cambridge Public Library. Soon after this, I was asked to review a proposal for a book on molecular biology by Oxford University Press. As they were the publishers of A Second Identity, I said I would review the proposal in return for a copy. They ransacked their warehouses, but not one copy could be found. For the next 18 years I visited every second-hand book shop with the fantasy that somewhere, someone owned a copy and extreme circumstances, even death, would have forced its sale. I haunted market stalls in remote East Anglian towns, and second-hand bookshops in America, France, Germany, Norway, South Africa and Canada. I even dropped into one in Dar es Salaam. I did find several books this way, even some by Richard Cobb, but not A Second Identity. Periodically, I would borrow it from the Cambridge Public Library and reread it and, over the years, I began to entertain the thought of stealing it, or to put it more accurately, taking it out on a permanent loan. My plan was to borrow the book and then report that I had lost it in some irretrievable way, such as by its falling out of a window of an aeroplane, or being eaten by a hyena in East Africa or plucked out of my hand in a typhoon in Japan. But I never did so, not because of any moral qualms, but simply because I could not find a convincing story that would not immediately arouse suspicion. In 1998, I was discussing several matters with a historian of modern biology and told her the story. “Oh”, she said, “you should ask my husband to get you a copy, he is a dealer in rare books”. I immediately got in touch with him and a few months later I was the proud owner of a legally acquired copy. In 1999 he wrote to me and said that he had another copy, which he knew would excite my special interest as he had bought it from the Cambridge Public Library at a sale of their surplus books. I now have that one as well. R725