My Books

Michel de Montaigne wrote an essay 'On Books', disclaiming scholarship; claiming rather to be clumsy, slow-witted and forgetful, but explicitly intending to throw light on aspects of himself. Here I frankly do the same. 

I love my books as friends. Each book shares with me at least one common interest, and in many cases more than one. Sometime I discover an interest and recruit the books to share and deepen it. Sometime a book will initiate the friendship and open my eyes to a new fascination. Sometime a book will introduce me to its friends, as when I met Coleridge as a friend of Wordsworth. Then, through Coleridge, I met Hazlitt and Lamb.

Some of my books are old friends, going away back to my earliest childhood.  At that age books appeared at the whim of grown-ups. Some I retain largely by chance, for I had to share family books with six siblings. Thus, I have Father's copy of  'Household Stories from the collection of the Brothers Grimm', and Granny's 'Lives of the Hunted'. My Mother must have brought to the family shelves S. R. Crockett's 'The Lilac Sunbonnet' (the first time that my pre-adolescent heart-strings had been played upon in that way). Two more books that were chosen for me, but which I dearly loved, are: 'The Secret Garden' (by F.H. Burnett, illustrated, Heinemann, 1949 printing); and a book of Irish folk tales called 'The Little Good People' (by Kathleen Foyle, illustrated, Frederick Warne, 1949 printing), given me (as I always imagined) by our Irish nanny.

When I was only eight, I was allowed to cycle by myself down from our home in Juniper Green to Colinton Library, one of the many public libraries in Scotland that benefited from Andrew Carnegie's support. I remember the excitement at seeing so many books. And borrowing Tom Brown's Schooldays, though that was read to us by Father. As a teenager I roamed the shelves of the two public libraries in Shrewsbury, and the dustier recesses of the town's second-hand bookshops. I owe to those dusty shelves my love of the helplessly irascible Walter Savage Landor, and his 'Imaginary Conversations'. From Landor (the first man I heard described as a 'Literary Lion') I learned what little I know of the private life of Aesop. Also his fascinatingly arrogant 4-line 'Finis'. But alas, his sun has set; his name is scarcely known today. 

Likewise to those dusty shelves I owe my transient admiration of Herbert Spencer. What heroic ambition!; his plan to summarise all knowledge in a 10-volumed 'System of Synthetic Philosophy', a work that took him forty years to compile. Knowing my limits as a slow-reader, I bought only his 'First Principles', intriguingly divided into two sections: (i) The Unknowable, and (ii) The Knowable. When I moved to the Biology sixth form at school, I quickly concluded that I would learn nothing about biology from Spencer, and disposed of my 'First Principles'. Like Landor, Spencer is another sad relic, passing in a hundred years from clubbing at the Athenaeum with Presidents of the Royal Society, to virtual anonymity; his fossilized remains barely discernible in the forgotten strata of second-hand bookshops. 

I may confess here my pride in owning a 1847 edition of Robert Chambers's 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation'.  What a lovely conceit, that of prying into the mind of God as he fumbled his way towards the creation of man! Chambers wondering (for example) if those two small nipples were added to a man's chest "for mere appearance sake" (p. 200). This 6th edition (like the earlier ones) was anonymous, as the canny Robert Chambers did not want to bring trouble on himself or his family. This book was acknowledged (by Darwin himself) as paving the way for the acceptance of Darwin's  Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. It seems clear that Chambers was as convinced as Darwin, and Lamarck, of the long slow process of evolution, but he suggested no mechanism. If the animals and plants had been created by a divine hand, then clearly God had been at work experimenting for many thousands of years. Today it seems amazing that church leaders were still, mid-nineteenth-century, so outwardly confident in their opposition to the idea of evolution. 

I might mention one other book where my pride in ownership (such as it is) outweighs my regard for the book. The preposterous Lord Chesterfield wrote some 400 letters to his illegitimate son, trying to teach him the superficial polish that he himself valued so highly. He told his son: “I shall love you extremely, while you deserve it; but not one moment longer.” The illegitimate Phillip himself fathered two sons before secretly marrying their mother. He died before his father who, in his will, provided for the two boys, but not for their mother; whereupon she exposed the mean-spirited Earl to ridicule by selling  the accumulated letters for 1,500 guineas. I bought my copy in 1990 when my son was 12, thinking I might learn some tips in parenting; but was horrified at the advice it so earnestly advocated.

I do not know how Plato's shorter dialogues first came into my hands. Were they simply 'in the house', or was I rooting about in Shrewsbury's town library where Darwin himself had been a schoolboy? The first I read was either 'Gorgias' or 'Protagoras', which I read as an elegant routing of a pompous windbag. I soon chased up the others. I was perhaps most impressed at Socrates's demonstration (in 'Meno') that the slave boy intuitively knew Pythagoras' theorem; and was most moved by the death of Socrates (in 'Phaedo'). Socrates became one of my adolescent heroes, and for years was shoulder to shoulder with Jesus.

Yes, I love my books, deeply but not exclusively. In the spring of 1962, the family moved from the fine 18 century dower house at Dorrington that we had rented for 7 years, to a smaller, newer, house in Carding Mill Valley. I came back from college to find the family already in occupation. Instead of my old room, under the eaves on the 2nd floor, facing south over the rose-garden, where the swifts swooped and screeched as they came in to their nests, I now shared a bedroom with my older brother. But I still had my fumed oak dining table, and my mahogany chest-of-drawers; and my books. One evening, after I had retired from the drawing room, Father came up to tell me that Mother had been quite hurt by my saying, over our postprandial coffee, that "I loved coming home to my books". Oh dear! I could not un-say it.  Of course I loved my mother too. But let me return to my theme, for that was meant as a brief aside; we still have a way to go.

        We were a moderately large family; by 1958 we numbered six boys and one girl. I was in the lucky position of being born second.  By inclination and by choice I did not compete. I was a slow, but retentive, reader. And it may be for that reason that I read relatively few novels; perhaps some forty in my entire life. Or perhaps I read more like 100 novels. I remember Father buying several copies of Sartre's La Nausea and Kafka's The Castle and handing them round, saying that this was the sort of stuff his psychiatric patients were telling him. But I think my main fascination was to learn about things; people, their ideas and their doings. Not people's fantasies ("wouldn't it be nice if" ). 

I suppose I was rather normal as a teenager, but unique for all that; at least in my reading, where I differed from my siblings. And who else might I compare myself with, for we were a rather isolated family, perpetuating perhaps our shy father's own boyhood isolation, and his insecurities. In Dorrington, we had entertained for several days a visitor from New Zealand, a Dr. Armstrong; he who had established the medical practice and built the house that had become for three years our home in Taupo. He gave me a book called 'The Boy's Country Book', containing articles on camping, fishing, gliding, underwater swimming, plant hunting, beach combing, and more.  Why me? Perhaps I already showed signs that I would become a botanist. Or, perhaps my path in life was determined by the book. In either case it became a favourite. In the next few years I made myself a canoe, kept pigeons, caught fish with my fingers, fly-fished our stream, collected and identified wild-flowers, bought myself flippers and snorkel, camped rough-and-light, and youth-hosteled.  

Two others of my favourite teenage books may be mentioned here: E.V. Lucas' 'The Open Road' anthology, and Stephen Graham's 'The Gentle Art of Tramping'. The latter explained how to make coffee in a billycan, and advised plenty of handkerchiefs. I have since walked (sleeping rough): Edinburgh to Moffat and back, Church Stretton to Llanbister Road station, Göttingen to Kassel, and part of the way from Paris to Dieppe. 

I love my volume of Mathematical Tables: Logarithms to 7 decimal places, Trigonometrical, Nautical and other tables. The Log(base 10) of 3 is 0.4771213. Not that I can navigate, but I like the idea that I am able to correct celesetial altitude observation for refraction according to temperature and atmospheric pressure. And calculate the distance (in nautical miles) to the visible horizon from my height above sea-level (in feet). And I enjoy my volume on 'Driving'  (1890) for its binding, for its haughty exclusion of the 'motor carriage'; but chiefly for its coverage of 'single-harness' and 'tandem-driving' by Lord Algernon St. Maur and Lady Georgiana Curzon respectively.  Even though I, myself, never drove more than a two wheeled 'governess cart'. 

My real-life heroes are mostly intellectual heroes: Socrates, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, J.S. Mill, Darwin, Einstein. I have biographies and, where available, autobiographies. Regarding men of action, I have biographies of Nelson and Wellington, and bought (or was given) Slocum's 'Sailing Alone Around the World', George Bayly's Sea Life Sixty Years Ago, and Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. Yet I am amongst the least nautical members of my family;  for half of the family sail, and half do not, just as half play music and half do not. 

I have numerous books of biography, travel, history and philosophy; too many to list. And, in any case, owning, reading, and loving, are three very different things. I have several large dictionaries, and a similar number of grammars or guides to usage, poetry in collections and single authored volumes, and some hundred works of fiction ranging from Chaucer to the present. But these do not clamour to be listed. 

        However, I fear I bore my readers with this deliberate and un-called-for exhibition of my inner life.