My Books

Montaigne wrote un essai 'On Books', disclaiming all knowledge and explicitly intending to throw light only 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. As a teenager I roamed the shelves of our public libraries and the dustier recesses of second-hand bookshops. Before that, books appeared at the will or whim of grown-up relatives. If I have them still it will be 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 'Grey Owl', and 'Lives of the Hunted'. My Mother must have brought to the family shelves S. R. Crockett's 'Sir Toady Lion', which moved me no less than Crockett's  'The Lilac Sunbonnet'; the first time that my pre-adolescent heart-strings had been played upon in that way. 

I owe to those dusty shelves my love of the helplessly irascible Walter Savage Landor, though my one remaining volume of 'Imaginary Conversations' seems to have belonged to my great aunt Mima. 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 that fascinatingly arrogant 4-lined 'Finis'. But alas, he has had his day; his sun has set. 

Likewise to those dusty shelves I owe my transient admiration of Herbert Spencer. What heroic ambition!; to conceive and summarise all knowledge in his 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. Excited by Darwin, Spencer had coined the phrase "Survival of the Fittest", and, seeing how these ideas ramified, he boldly formed the idea of linking everything up; biology, sociology, ethics, psychology. 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'. Spencer  is another sad relic, passing from membership of the Athenaeum and clubbing with Presidents of the Royal Society, to virtual anonymity. 

I may confess here my pride in owning a 1847 edition of Chambers's 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation'. This book was credited (by Darwin himself) as paving the way for Darwin's  theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. 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 the two little 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. It seems clear to me that Chambers was as convinced as Darwin, and Lamarck, of the long slow process of evolution, but suggested no mechanism. If the animals and plants were created by a divine hand, then clearly God was at work for many thousands of years. That raises further question, but today it seems amazing that church leaders were so united and so apparently confident in their opposition. 

I should 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 superficiality 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 their mother; whereupon she sold her late husband's accumulated letters for 1,500 guineas. I bought my copy in 1990 when my son was 12, thinking I might learn some tips in fathering; 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 just 'around the house', or was I rooting about in the town library? The first I read was either 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' demonstration (in 'Meno') that the slave boy intuitively knew Pythagoras' theorem; and 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 or summer 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 own 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 postprandial coffee, that "I loved coming home to my books". 

Tant pis! 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.

There were other quaintnesses in my teenage 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. In Dorrington, we had entertained for several days a visitor from New Zealand, Dr. Armstrong, he who had established the medical practice and built the house that was our home  in Taupo for three years. He gave me a book called 'The Boy's Country Book', containing articles on camping, fishing, gliding, underwater swimming, plant hunting, beach combing. 

 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, 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. 

My real-life heroes are mostly intellectual heroes: Socrates, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, 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 (to give away) Slocum's 'Sailing Alone Around the World'.

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 well over a dozen 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 also do not clamour to be listed.