Dirty books and dusty friends

I have lots of dirty books. They gather dust, on their “foxed”  woolly edged yellow pages and their warped covers with water marks where somebody may have read them in the bath. And they smell. Many of them are not pleasant. Yet I seem to have done nothing but chuck out books since just before moving three years ago. Of course, that’s three more years of aging, for the ones that survived the cull.

Very old paperbacks…

Old books…

Remember this?

Now I may move again. Every time I move, bookseller’s daughter that I am, I take care to pack my books alphabetically and by classification, with directions on the box for their destination. (Years ago, a removal man burst out laughing: “French Drama in the Back Bedroom eh? Can I come round when you’ve unpacked?”)

New uses for a dictionary

Yesterday, on a whim, I organised and shelved them properly. You could call it fiddling while Rome burns, as I should have been tidying up for the estate agent to take his photos (despite that old Anthony Powell novel, Books Do Furnish a Room). In this house, there had been so much decorating to do, the books had travelled economy class straight into the loft and been unearthed haphazardly as I felt the need of them. It suddenly seemed important they should take their proper place at this address, albeit briefly. So I had the usual experience of meeting and greeting old friends, despairing how they’d aged, reacquainting myself with loved ones I thought I’d lost, regretting the dear departed, and wondering what I’d ever seen in others.  

Here too were books inherited from my parents: a lovely set of Virginia Woolf, my father’s Proust. Why keep that? I was supposed to read it in French at university (I managed volumes 1,2, and 9), and anyway the Scott Moncrieff translation has been superseded by a new one. But he did persevere with it, because my mother was taking her French degree at the same time and if he couldn’t beat her he’d join her (he never beat her in any sense of the word.) Here’s his “Catch 22” with some original publicity postcards inside it, and my mother’s childhood “Just So Stories” with Kipling’s mesmerising illustrations. 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Shelving alphabetically gives happy accidents. There’s an MA thesis waiting to be written on what besides the first two letters links MArquez and MAugham, or JM COetzee and Wilkie COllins. (Taking out the Collins, I see it cost 6s 6d and the front is inscribed: “EVERYMAN, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side.” That’s timely.) Meanwhile the juxtapositions remind me of my own attendance at the Great Amazon Dinner Party.  Oh NO, here’s my book, sitting to the right of my father’s.

Old and new in the D,E,F section

Father and daughter side by side

Here’s a full set of “King Penguins”. I think I’ll save them for a blog post of their own. Here are all the Virago Modern Classics. Here are my travel guides and phrasebooks. My dictionaries are redundant, arguably, since the Internet, but they have other uses and it would be sad to offload them after so many distractions in their alphabetical juxtapositions. Here are some old children’s books, also agog for their own blog post, and my father’s novels which I don’t imagine anyone will ever read now. Here are novels that have come with me from London to Brighton, to Paris, back to Brighton, to Dijon, to Sheffield, and then through three moves within London. I can almost hear their fragile pages sighing, “…not again! Don’t move us! Only the dust and grease is still holding us together.” From some: “Why not re-read us, while you’re at it?” And from one or two, despondent, quietly, almost not daring to utter: “Why didn’t you ever open me?”

A book I’ll never read…

Here’s Kafka, sneering in a corner: the move won’t work, first you have to negotiate chains and gazumping and bureaucracy and surveys and searches and gazundering...Here’s Dickens: The house you like squats on a seeping marsh, held up only by the will of the long dead builder, mouldering and grimy and repository of of voluminous secrets and scandals… Here’s Jane Austen: The elegant bow window in which the company took up position with a view to examining the panorama, was thinly glazed and afforded  considerable draughts... Here’s C S Lewis: In one empty room there was nothing but a huge wardrobe, perhaps left behind by previous owners for whom it had been too large to move….Bill Bryson chortles as Dorothy Parker raises a glass sardonically. 

Books in the bedroom…the “children’s” rooms (the ones they left behind), art books in the living room, their reproductions poor by modern standards, their colours dated, their outlines blurred, and yet…this is how many people only ever saw great art, when we travelled less. Even books in the kitchen – the estate agent shakes his head. But surely he won’t mind books in the study?

Like the ghosts of old retainers or clinging family my books accompany me from house to house, and I only manage to exorcise a few each time. Those “grown up books” first read and misunderstood as a teenager, those university textbooks, those introductions to teaching theory and translation theory, the light relief novels, the silent books that haunt you, the beautiful writing that’s as satisfying as a picture in an art gallery that pulls you in to look.  The new editions of the few books I loved so much I replaced their worn out predecessors. The relative newcomers (Dunmore, Tremain, Zadie Smith) ask  the old hands: “Is this the start of a lifetime climbing in and out of boxes?” 

Books I replaced with newer copies

The estate agent arrives to take pictures. He’s a chatty man, and his words donate me a new character for a novel I may write : “I have to watch politefully, you know, when my wife’s on the muscle shows.” He prowls, an animal poised for hunting. He crouches in peculiar positions, his camera at odd angles. I must have a querying expression. “Just trying to keep the books out of shot,” he says. So, dear readers, if you don’t like what you see on Rightmove, please find below this blog post an alternative brochure of house particulars, and contact me if you’d like to arrange a viewing.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

 

©Jessica Norrie 2017