More Pictures of Shelves of Books

 Furthermore to the below, some 1970's issues of The Listener were among the discoveries, including the 50th anniversary edition of 1979 including some pluperfect looks further back through their archives then. It was much-loved and is still much-missed, not the least for the day the fourth form version of me had a letter published in it.

Earlier my magazine reading had been Rover & Wizard of which no copies survive so I might write my own. Neither are there any of my subscription to a cheap few sheets of hack guesswork called the Weekend Racing Blue. But there are a number of Beano's from the days when it was thought to be essential reading for students into their twenties rather than the kids it was ostensibly aimed at.

By far the worst find was the college magazine edited by me from university in 1979. It's a horror. However unsatisfactory one finds oneself now, I can't be as bad as I was then and the excuse for being quite that shambolic was that it was the punk fashion isn't good enough. The self one meets on the way back in these circumstances is not always someone you want to be reminded of.

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But the next phase of the gradual, chronic, ongoing 'sorting out' was the decision to put the novels, fiction and associated books in better order. It was a more enjoyable and less arduous project than it might have been. If the poetry books number over 500, then fiction is about 400.

Complete enough collections of George Eliot, Murakami, Graham Swift and Julian Barnes are elsewhere. Taking up honourable amounts of shelf space on these shelves are the old Solzhenitsyn obesession, Hardy, Ian McEwan, the more recent Balzacs, Patrick Hamilton, Joyce, Camus, Salinger and Banana Yoshimoto. Also mentioned in despatches are Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, William Trevor, Alexei Sayle ( ? ) and Alan Bennett. Whereas  I have a fairly solid idea of a favourite poets list, I'm less sure about prose fiction once Dubliners is established as far and away the model of excellence.

The catalogue of what should be there is in my head. Looking at the new arrangement and adjusting it here and there, I wondered where Mansfield Park was, not that I was that
bothered, or The Counterfeiters in English but they were soon found and put in their rightful places. But where were the Hardy stories. Oh, no, that's right. I gave them to Pauline when I bought the Collected. I still think there are one or two Hermann Hesse's missing from circa 1977. It's not that I want them this minute but there always seem to be a couple of items that evade one's finding and they suddenly become the ones you most want to look at, or hear, again.

But, it was a highly satisfactory exercise, the feeling of having however vaguely put one's lands in order and one stands there for a few moments to survey it well aware that, no, the profession of librarianship didn't miss much when it missed out on me. The first half goes from Ackroyd and, I'd just like to say, Akutagawa, to Kundera and the second from Doris Lessing to Zola.

While I'm ever reluctant to dispose of books and rarely pass them elsewhere, it is surely an offence to destroy them. In all conscience, I did the best I could with On Hunting by Roger Scruton. I thought I'd safely disposed of it as humanely as possible years ago but there it still was. I didn't buy it. It came in a box of others I was once donated.

I put it in the re-cycling, un-read.

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Lost Illusions, to the right of the section of black books on the top row of the first picture, was one of Balzac's best despite its later stages being predominantly about legal and finanicial transactions, failure or skullduggery. But Lucien is diverted from the suicide he seemed destined for, the precocious talent having been found unable to join itself to the discipline required to be successful in the hard-nosed world. And so the last line refers us forward to another book, which is A Harlot High and Low, and so that comes next while in the meantime I do a crash course in the history of Philosophy by means of a series of booklets that came with The Independent many years ago. Thomas Hobbes, for one, was as good as he was said to be and why he was probably made the main thing on our first year Phiolosophy course. I should have read Leviathan then but The Clash were on and I was editing a terrible poetry magazine and then making a bad job of the college magazine.

There's no point regretting all that now. I'm making up for lost time and will eventually make myself worthy of the degree they somehow were still gracious enough to award me.

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I'm sure the new disc of Arcangelo's recording of the Opus 2 Buxtehude Trio Sonatas will be ordered soon and if one gets that then one can hardly not have the Opus 1 disc as well. How many recordings of such music should one have when one realizes there are String Quartets by Mozart, Haydn and Schubert unrepresented on the shelves. Well, we'll see. Hooper winning the Novice Chase at Newton Abbot in a few minutes' time should decide me.