My First Library Book

Last  weekend being Mother's Day, pause for reflection.

I thought of my own mother, who sadly died 25 years ago.

I promised to write of my first library book.  Naturally, it was my mother who took me to the library, filled in the forms, and generally guided the experience.

How different libraries were in 1958, (I was five years old). It astonishes me that, more than 50 years later, the practice of date-stamping the required return date has ONLY JUST faded out.  Now you have to put the books in a thing like an X-Ray scanner, and print out a slip of paper telling you the return date.

In those days, you were issued literally with a card, a small piece of cardboard. Now it is a plastic credit-card shape with a bar-code.

There was no cornucopia of colourful picture books then.  Probably post-war paper shortages were still in force.  I do remember that paper was expensive, and coloured printing even more so - magazines were in black and white, and advertising catelogues of glossy things were rare.

There were no squashy sofas and child-high book troughs to delve into.  There seemed to be no children's section as such.  Children's books probably WERE stacked in one section, but they looked just the same as all the other books, because they were all bound in ghastly faux leather house binding in dreary dark green or maroon.

As I could not reach these high shelves, nor tell one dark and uniformly bound book from another, my mother made the choice of my first library book.  And it was just the one book.  In those days you were limited to three, now you can take home twelve at a time.

My mother homed in straight away on a book she must have alreaady decided on, and took it down.  Without consulting me, she marched me to the desk and we took the book home.

It was by Mrs Molesworth, and was called "The Cuckoo Clock".   I am certain that I could not have read it myself, she must have read it to me.  It is quite a substantial, dense tome, about the length for example, of "The Secret Garden".  I don't remember a thing about it except the title and the author, and the external binding, stencilled with the title in gold lettering.

I now own a second-hand copy of this book, and still haven't re-read it.  It just doesn't grip me.  However, what does interest me is that it was first published in 1877! 

This must have been a book my mother had read in her childhood.  She was born in 1924, so most likely a grandparent or person of that generation had introduced it to her. Her adoptive father was born in about 1870 (according to family research my brother brought here at Christmas for me to look at) so it may even have been he who sat her down and possibly read it aloud. Someone certainly gave her a love of reading and a passion for the use of the library.

I still love libraries, although they are such different places now.  And children's books are so colourful and varied, and often so very funny. Troops of school children are brought by their teachers to experience the library, and a Mothers and Toddlers singing group takes place regularly. (In my childhood, you were scowled at if you so much as whispered a conversation in the hallowed place!)

All these are certainly changes for the better. Long live the library!

My Library Book

So I now owned two copies of Thomas Hardy's "Life and Art", two copies of Thomas Hardy's "Life"  and two copies of "The Young Thomas Hardy" by Robert Gittings.    I had been searching for this last on Amazon, because our local public library had the companion volume, "The Older Thomas Hardy".  I read "The Older", and returned it to the library with a suggestion.

Would they like to accept my donation of the younger?  I explained my disappointment, on finding that only half the material was available.  "I feel that other people who are studying TH may wish to have both the volumes available".  The third person I spoke to (having been passed along a chain of command) agreed.

I was pleased.

Amazon Marketplace

Secondhand books!  One of the greatest pleasures of life.  I ordered 14 books about Thomas Hardy. Such was the enthusiasm with which I pressed "buy" that I later found out I had ordered the same book in different editions in three cases.  Never mind, three of the duplicates cost the enormous sum of £0.01 each.  I can scarcely believe that anyone finds it worthwhile to trade in books that they can only sell for one penny.  I suppose that they make a small profit on the post and package costs which are £2.80 per book.

The most expensive book in the collection was only £7.49.    Two are individually numbered copies of a book published in a limited edition of two thousand.  That feels rather special, even if they are both ex-library books, with the old date-stamps still intact.  The older of the two has date stamps going back to 1938. That is almost antique!  They are from university libraries.  One of these cost £3.99 and the other £2.49.

Another book cost £0.87.  How does that work? How did someone arrive at that figure for an out-of-print copy of TH's Notebooks? 

I am not complaining.  It has been like Christmas here for the last two weeks - exciting parcels arriving by almost every post, and an absolute feast of interesting reading.

Electronic Equipment Seduces Me, but I Resist

I've commented before on the strange dissimilarity between myself and a very old friend  (32 years and counting), concerning her dislike of second hand books. Second hand books are one of the greatest joys of my life. She already has a Kindle (150 books on it waiting to be read, when I saw her last week), and has now bought an I-pad.  I asked her what she was going to use if for, and she didn't know.  You can read books on an Ipad, as well as play games and do emails.  She already has equipment to do all that, and I have to conclude that it was the aesthetic beauty of the I-pad which she could not resist. I thought the same myself, whilst waiting in PC World recently for the stock department to cough up a result for a new laptop I was considering purchasing. I was drawn to the display of Ipads, and picked one up.  It was lovely to hold, lovely to look at, and the clarity of the graphics was just so brilliant.  I was terribly tempted, but had to keep telling myself, "You cannot run Microsoft Office on this equipment, and the whole reason I wish to buy a new laptop is so that I can run the full suite of Office equipment and send documents electronically with ease to others using the same programmes."

The possibibility of reading books on an I-Pad was not a factor at all in my thinking.  I love the feel of old books, I love the colour of old paper, and the distinctive character of different type faces.  The physical weight of a real book tells you something about the contents.  After Hilary Mantel won the Booker prize a second time last week, I retrieved from my bookcase my copy of her first win, "Wolf Hall". It's a hardback, which cost £1 in a charity shop.   About eighteen months ago, charity shops were flooded out with copies of "Wolf Hall", presumably because people had found it to be unreadable, after being given copies for Christmas.  The heavy, solemn dimensions give a preview of what the book will be like to read - not light or frothy.

At the present time, I am reading a copy of "A Pair of Blue Eyes", by Thomas Hardy.  My copy, sourced in the excellent "Oxfam" Bookshop in Guildford, was printed in 1895.  It is not a "First Edition" (the book was published in 1873), but a first "new" edition of the version printed by the American publisher, Osgood, McIlvaine.

Well over 100 years old, the spine is weak, and bits of old brown paper drop out of the binding when I prop it up in my book stand to read over meals.

The paper is yellow, the margins wide, the cut edges of the paper uneven, and the typeface small,  hard to read without my reading glasses.

Wishing to find out more about the book,  I went to the local library and took out a modern edition, "The Oxford World's Classics"  version.  This gives two maps of Wessex, a preface, an Introduction, a Note on the Text, a reading list, other historical notes, and an Appendix.

This is a pristine paperback, with a colour picture on the cover, and only one borrower has taken it out before me. It is printed in the Oxford Classics typeface, exactly the same as that used in its companion, "Jude the Obscure", also in my library pile.

The book smells of nothing, and gives out no atmosphere.  I have read all the introductions and notes, but not the text (even though it differs slightly from the earlier, as TH revised it frequently during his lifetime, and this version has taken into account revisions later than 1895).

It does not stimulate my imagination.  Reading the yellowing pages of the older book conjures up a time when women wore long skirts, had no vote and little chance of any education, and had to rely on marriage for a chance to leave the family home.  Ladies, in particular, had to be shy, modest, able to play the piano and ride a horse, and had to have a spotless and unkissed past in order to impress a gentleman suitor.  It is easy to connect with that long ago time when the book connects you with it.  The new book, a uniform edition, has no such effect.

I do feel that a Kindle would have an even more dampening effect on my imagination. 

Not long ago, on one of my now frequent visits to the library, an assistant approached me and tried to interest me in attending a lecture by Miriam Margolyes on electronic books. This lecture was free, and apparently designed to stimulate interest.


I was shocked, and told her I had no intention of moving over to electronic.  This being in the actual library, I was rather worried that in ten years time there will be no books left on the shelves.

More encouraging was a small book I saw recently in the shop in the British Library.  It was by former Booker Winner Julian Barnes, and was a hymn of praise in favour of real books, and particularly of second hand ones.  I vowed to continue building up my stocks!

Bad Books

Yes, I am in bad books at present, because I suggested that, as an alternative to spending so much money, we save more.  Thus we can plan to retire before we are too worn out to enjoy it.  Hubby discussed this idea with his golfing partner, (also his business partner, one and the same man).  Predictably the advice was to "Do what you like".  Which is, in both their cases, to enjoy expensive hobbies and meals out, and carry right on moaning about how stressful their business is.

That's not what this post is about, however.

I rarely pick up a bad book.  I can tell by the covers whether I am going to enjoy a book or not.  Anything that looks like mass-produced science fiction or detective stories or chick-lit or Mills and Boon just screams out what is inside, and is easy to avoid.  Misery memoirs - you don't even have to look at the cover design - it's all in the title.  I have never read a misery memoir and never intend to do so.

Occasionally, however, I am deceived.  I've been noticing a book coming beneath my radar three times over recent months.  It is called "The Last Dickens", by Matthew Pearl.  I've considered buying it both new and second-hand, but in the end got it out of the local library.  That's not something I do often, either.  I prefer to own a good book.  Something must have told my instincts that it was not a book I would want to keep.

This book was billed as an imaginative recreation of the last days of Dickens, an investigation into the "Mystery of Edwin Drood" (Dickens' last and unfinished novel) and maybe an uncovering of the secret of the intended ending of that last book.

This book was truly terrible.  I started off by reading every third page, having established before I was half-way through the first chapter that it was unreadable.  By about a quarter of the way through, this had given way to only looking at a page which had the word "Dickens" on it, and scanning it for anything of interest.  Half way through and I was reading a word or paragraph about every ten pages.  By the end I  knew that I had not missed anything, but felt that I had not wasted my journey to the library.  I had given the book a chance, but it had not lived up to the billing.

The only interesting thing about this book is that the main character is an American publisher called Osgood.  The author's note at the end indicates that this man is an actual historical character. 

I have an 1895 American first edition of Thomas Hardy's "A Pair of Blue Eyes"  (provenance Guildford Oxfam Bookshop).  The publisher is Osgood.  That made a connection.