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When I was a kid, the way we kept books in our house reflected our attitudes to reading.
My mum had a shelf in the kitchen-diner, jostling with well-thumbed Catherine Cookson and Georgette Heyer novels and factual history books with tatty dust covers. The books were close to the table, well-used, accessible. My mum did – and still does – read incessantly, so she always needed something absorbing to hand, even if she was in the middle of making a white sauce or slicing a gammon joint at the time. Books were an everyday essential to be consumed along with the gammon and white sauce.
I don’t remember having a bookshelf of my own and as I caught the reading bug from my mum and like her always had a book ‘on the go’, I suspect I ‘shelved’ mine on the floor. To say my bedroom was untidy would be to seriously underestimate the health and safety – and hygiene – implications. Imagine the contents of every chest of drawers, wardrobe and toy cupboard in a nine year old’s bedroom – the pink denim flares, the Sindy dolls, the Teddy bears … the amputated limbs and severed heads of Sindys and bears. Now imagine all of that tipped on the floor and mixed with orange squash, crushed Bourbons, mouldy tea cups and Toffo wrappers, with the vague whiff of stale socks and you’ll be getting somewhere close to the ‘experience’ that was my room.
The tragedy is, of course, that when I eventually did clean and tidy this biohazard, I probably killed a cure to some exotic disease along the way. Cleanliness: potentially disastrous for the future of mankind.
My dad treated books in a much less cavalier fashion.
His education had not been the best. It’s not that he wasn’t intelligent, but I suspect he had undiagnosed dyslexia and as he was at school in the 1950s when dyslexic kids were usually filed under ‘slow and lazy’ he was never given the option of Further or Higher Education – manual work was his destiny.
I think because of this, dad put reading and education on a pedestal. He saw them as gateways to a better life, a kinder, easier life. Maybe that’s why he collected serious books – nothing lightweight, nothing ‘fun’, always educational, informative or worthy.
The books I remember most clearly were the complete works of Charles Dickens. Green leather bound with gold lettering on the spines, they sat in a row on the shelf, a little out of place on the plasticised hardboard – too perfect to be touched.
I remember him telling me how wonderful Dickens was. How Oliver Twist’s Fagin could charm and cheat and Bill Sikes would terrify, and the murder of Nancy would leave you breathless, sleepless, drenched in the poor girl’s blood. How for every Quilp, Wackford Squeers and Uriah Heep that emerges to blight the lives of our heroes, there’ll be a Peggotty, Joe Gargery or Mr Brownlow to help them.
He clearly loved the books, but I was nine or ten at the time and more into reading The Beano or finding my lost Misty comics than slipping onto a nineteenth century idiom. It was too challenging for me – to boring.
I never read a single one of those bright shiny tomes. They stayed on the shelf, remaining relics to gaze on, rather than worlds to experience.
The Works of Charles Dickens have become Books in the Blood not through my dad’s copies, but through ones I bought myself years later. Mine were only cheap paperbacks – not a scrap of green leather or gold leaf anywhere. But the words were the same – those amazing characters, old London brought to life – and that was what mattered.
Word Shamble 
Those “gentlemen’s club” libraries with their serried ranks of complete Plato, Thomas Aquinas or Bacon always seem to say Look, Don’t Touch; they feel more like expensive wall covering designed to overawe rather than objects for browsing and dipping into.
My shelves — I hope — are more like those in a superior secondhand bookshop, the books “pre-owned” and pre-loved, that might encourage the visitor to ooh and ah and grab a title to savour. And not just the visitor, of course, me too! Collected editions? Not my cup of tea either, I like each book to be individual, whether paperback or hard cover, and showing evidence of being used.
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Yes, you’re right. There’s an episode of ‘Black Books’ where a man comes into the bookshop, wanting to buy a set of novels and asks if the bindings are real leather, because everything else in his libarary is leather. ‘I’m not sure if they’re real leather,’ replies Bernard Black. ‘But they’re real Dickens.’And that’s the point, isn’t it. I never wanted a complete works of Dickens, because even his ardent admirers admit that some of his books are better than others – the Old Curiousity Shop is NOT a fav. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.’ So I no longer have that one … but Oliver Twist is very well read, along with Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend – and the Christmas Books, of course. Having a collection like a ‘superior second hand bookshop’ sounds perfect to me 🙂
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