If a house without a cat is soulless so a house without a library is equally barren. Looking at photographs of some recently erected book shelves in the house of a family who donated our male Tom, Archie, last December turned me to consider my own library here at our little place in Longoio, Italy.
One of the first things upon settling into our new dwelling was to get our local carpenter to make some rustic chestnut shelves to house those volumes we considered worth the effort to transplant from our former abode in the UK.
My own set of shelves
was subsequently mirrored by Sandra’s set.
But what is on these shelves and how have they been built up over the years we have been here? Amazingly we found that the house’s previous owner had been quite a book collector himself and we found some antique volumes dating back to the seventeenth century, mainly of an ecclesiastical nature which formed the kernel of our new ‘biblioteca’.
There were some more recent acquisitions showing that the owner, a Second World War hero who had lost an arm in combat, had a particular interest in military memoirs. I was particularly taken by accounts of the Italian alpine campaigns on the Russian front – surely one of the most futile and heroic actions ever. But then all war is futile: ‘the pity of war’ as that great war poet, Wilfred Owen, declared.
Added to this original nucleus discovered in our house’s attic are the majority of books: those of my own collection. At school our English literature master, who still happily remains active, severely told us what was worth reading and what wasn’t. As a Leavis acolyte he stressed the great tradition of novel writing – George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Joseph Conrad among them. This was fine with me as I grew to love much of their work. Dickens’ ‘Little Dorrit’ with its unremitting analysis of the Englishman abroad and Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ remain two of the few novels I dare to re-read.
Of course, poetry takes up an essential part of my library. I doubt whether I shall ever be remembered as a poet but I love reading and writing it. Keats, Crashaw, Shelley and T. S. Eliot are key people in my canon.
There is a fair selection of non-fiction of which travel writing takes up the major part. Naturally, Italy occupies most of the focus. In this respect I remember writing as a teenager articles on ‘un turista in Italia ‘ for a schoolfriend’s magazine aptly called ‘Novelty’. For me that word novelty has never quite deserted me (although some detractors may disagree!).
Apart from other books on such disparate subjects as rearing Muscovy ducks and restoring Fiat Five Hundreds (Cinquine) perhaps my most treasured books are those which have been donated to me by friends, a few of whom have sadly departed. Some of these books may just have been incisive presents. Others will be even more precious, having been written by their donors.
In this age where we are reading so much on digital media, whether it be on Kindle, the BBC news or Facebook’s tittle-tattle, there is nothing so satisfying and so rewarding as holding a book in one’s hands and turning its pages in wonder at what awaits. The beauty of the written page, the seductive smell of print, the utter assuredness of the book’s presence itself can never be superceeded. Whether in the depths of winter coziness before a log fire or under the shade of a parasol in the laziness of a summer’s Mediterranean heat there is nothing that will communicate the supreme devotion that a good book can offer.
My library, therefore, is not just a favourite collection of books; it is the whole universe of my intellectual and sensual being: the entire world that I have grown up in and will love until my dying day.
