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A Little More on Bibliophilia

Writer's picture: Adrian J. BoasAdrian J. Boas

In many ways I am a late bloomer. I began my university studies at the age of thirty-two, my academic career in my forties, and I became a novelist when I was in my seventies. Always an avid gardener, I recently picked up the pursuit of growing bonsai trees, a hobby that requires years before one sees the first results, and decades before a bonsai looks anything like what it should. I like to think that this is proof of my optimism and positive expectations, and after all, I do have some Methuselahs among my ancestors, so perhaps the genes are in my favour, and who knows what other directions I might find myself turning to in the following decades.


Now why am I rambling on about this? Oh, yes. It is because I wanted to say that being what is today politely referred to as a ‘senior’ (less graciously as a doddering geriatric), I often find it difficult to fall asleep, and on such occasions I pull out a book to read, and if I don’t have anything particularly enticing among my more recently acquisitions, I take down from the shelves one of the older volumes, something that I perhaps read thirty years ago, or a book that I acquired, but never, in fact, opened. This is what I did the other day.


The book I took down was a nineteenth century red-spined and marble-papered volume titled Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb.* I recalled Charles Lamb from my father’s copy of Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare, subtitled Designed for the Use of Young Persons, which I shamefully admit I never opened. And indeed, upon taking this book, I soon realised that I had never opened it either, though I must have possessed it for many years. This became apparent because many of the pages had never been cut and required inserting a metal ruler to separate them. But from the table of contents, I noted some familiar chapter names, and recalled that I possessed a newer, abridged edition of the same book, simply titled Essays. This was a book that I had in fact read, a beautifully bound The Folio Society edition, dated 1963, and decorated with some rather fine woodcut illustrations at the beginning of each essay.


The essay that caught my attention was "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading." It opens with a quote from Lord Foppington, a fictional character in the Restoration comedy The Relapse, by John Vanbrugh:


'To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.'


To this Lamb remarked that an acquaintance of his was 'so much struck with this bright sally of his lordship, that he left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.' However, Lamb admitted that he himself dedicated much of his time to other people's thoughts, in short, that he read a great deal.


I myself, was slow to begin reading seriously (another instance of my late development), but once I did start to read it became nothing short of an addiction. I go nowhere without a book, non-fiction and fiction, but particularly the latter. Indeed, I think that the idea to write a novel myself was a fear, that developed after reading a particularly good book, that I might not find one comparable, and that perhaps I should try to make some 'natural sprouts of my own.' This fear is baseless, as there are so many good books, and always more appearing. Of course there are far many more bad books, but they are generally easy to avoid.



* Elia was a pseudonym Lamb adopted for publication, and about whom he wrote in his preface in a most amusing, self-deprecating manner, as if Elia ('this poor gentleman') was a different person, recently deceased, and whose departure he 'did not know whether he ought to bemoan or rejoice'.



*****



Dear reader of my blog,


If you enjoy my posts, please consider subscribing on my blog webpage. This will encourage me to continue posting hopefully interesting content, and will keep you informed about my future publications, both literary and academic. As a bonus, I will provide any subscriber who requests, a pdf of my novel The Sulphur Priest.

A.B.

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