Brought to Book
Alan is under pressure to reduce his cherished book collection. It's a painful process, but there are some books with which he would simply never part. Here's his list of the books he goes back to again and again.
I have had a problem with books since I was a boy. Not the problem that is often voiced today about children never picking one up, but quite the reverse. I can’t get enough of them, though six thousand, by anyone’s reckoning, is enough. That was the number of them that occupied my shelves before our recent house move. We have downsized. It became clear even to me (it has been clear to my wife for quite some time) that there would simply be no room in our new house for each and every one of them, regardless of the fact that, as Anthony Powell opined, ‘Books do furnish a room’.
I took my wife’s point that she would quite like a little space for furnishings other than my cherished volumes.
So the move necessitated a thinning out of my children. Sorry, books. I still have the Beatrix Potters and one or two of the ‘Observer’ books from my childhood but I started collecting in earnest (though at the time I made no conscious decision to fill my life with them) in my teens.
