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Authors: Linda Grant
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sent to me after I
wrote to Virginia Woolf, unaware that she was no longer alive. It arrived in
the post on my 17th birthday.
There
may not have been a better time in history for a teenager to begin to build a
library than the sixties, the heyday of the cheap paperback, and of the
expanding paperback imprints: Fontana and Abacus are words which have as rich a
meaning to me as the cathedrals of Chartres or St Paul’s. If you ask me who I
am at 16, 17, I am a girl who reads. Not only reads, but reads widely. If,
young man, my parents were to permit you to enter my bedroom, which they won’t,
you will see what I have read, how extensively, and with what ambition.
***
In the middle of
my move I was watching a documentary called The Flat . A family was
clearing out the Tel Aviv apartment of a 97-year-old woman who had recently
died, a home in which she had lived for 70 years since arriving there from
Germany in the thirties. The walls of the flat were lined with books published
in her native language. Her grandson called in an antiquarian book dealer. He
took the volumes down off the shelf and hurled them with force to the floor.
‘No-one reads Balzac,’ he said. ‘No-one reads Shakespeare, nobody wants Goethe.
Know how many books they throw away in Germany?’
The
books were unwanted and unsalable. The film-maker spared us the horror of their
fate. Where did they go? Into the rubbish? Burned? Pulped? Holy of holies, the
printed book – and not even mass-market paperbacks. The leather-bound classic
on the pyre of the obsolete.
Who destroys
books? Cities, churches, dictators and fanatics. Their fingers itch to build a
pyre and strike the match. On 10 May 1933, students gathered in Berlin to dance
around a bonfire of 25,000 volumes of ‘un-German’ books. They burned, amongst
many others, Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, James
Joyce and H.G. Wells. They destroyed them because the contents were too
dangerous. Now, in an apartment on the Mediterranean, the same authors were
being dumped because no-one wanted to read them. They are the detritus not just
of the digital revolution but also of disposable living and small houses.
And I too have
committed murder
in my library. I have killed my books.
The
little girl who lay in bed, a circle of illumination on the sheets from her
toadstool nightlight, afraid to go to sleep because her Struwwelpeter picture
book lay next to her in the dark confinement of the ottoman with her toys,
frightened of the scissor man who cuts off the thumbs of children who suck them
– that small person, who even before she could read understood the power of a
book, has just liquidated half her own.
This
isn’t me . I am the adult outcome of the shy, awkward, only child, who instead of running
around outside in the garden, or clambering on dangerous arrangements of slide
and swing in the playground, or slapping bats against balls, or skipping down a
muddy lane, preferred above all else, as I still do, to stayed indoors and
read. Only children are no good socially. (A sister came along after eight
years, but by then the habits of solitude were set in the bone.) I found in
books my friends and my fantasy lands, and never looked to fiction for social
realism, or expected books to tell me about the life I led in suburban Liverpool,
with immigrant parents who muttered in an obscure tongue, and in the kitchen
made sure to find a use for every part of the chicken.
I was
enraptured by what disgruntled readers now refer to as matters ‘not relevant to
my personal experience’. By girls who wanted to become ballerinas and show
jumpers – though I was clumsy on my feet, and terrified of horses’ steaming
flanks and iron hooves. Edwardian children who walked up the Cromwell Road in
London, and imaginary creatures who lived in the sand. I was overly-familiar
with chairs that flew, with wardrobes that led to snowy woods, and holes in the
ground with hobbits in them. In books was
wrote to Virginia Woolf, unaware that she was no longer alive. It arrived in
the post on my 17th birthday.
There
may not have been a better time in history for a teenager to begin to build a
library than the sixties, the heyday of the cheap paperback, and of the
expanding paperback imprints: Fontana and Abacus are words which have as rich a
meaning to me as the cathedrals of Chartres or St Paul’s. If you ask me who I
am at 16, 17, I am a girl who reads. Not only reads, but reads widely. If,
young man, my parents were to permit you to enter my bedroom, which they won’t,
you will see what I have read, how extensively, and with what ambition.
***
In the middle of
my move I was watching a documentary called The Flat . A family was
clearing out the Tel Aviv apartment of a 97-year-old woman who had recently
died, a home in which she had lived for 70 years since arriving there from
Germany in the thirties. The walls of the flat were lined with books published
in her native language. Her grandson called in an antiquarian book dealer. He
took the volumes down off the shelf and hurled them with force to the floor.
‘No-one reads Balzac,’ he said. ‘No-one reads Shakespeare, nobody wants Goethe.
Know how many books they throw away in Germany?’
The
books were unwanted and unsalable. The film-maker spared us the horror of their
fate. Where did they go? Into the rubbish? Burned? Pulped? Holy of holies, the
printed book – and not even mass-market paperbacks. The leather-bound classic
on the pyre of the obsolete.
Who destroys
books? Cities, churches, dictators and fanatics. Their fingers itch to build a
pyre and strike the match. On 10 May 1933, students gathered in Berlin to dance
around a bonfire of 25,000 volumes of ‘un-German’ books. They burned, amongst
many others, Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, James
Joyce and H.G. Wells. They destroyed them because the contents were too
dangerous. Now, in an apartment on the Mediterranean, the same authors were
being dumped because no-one wanted to read them. They are the detritus not just
of the digital revolution but also of disposable living and small houses.
And I too have
committed murder
in my library. I have killed my books.
The
little girl who lay in bed, a circle of illumination on the sheets from her
toadstool nightlight, afraid to go to sleep because her Struwwelpeter picture
book lay next to her in the dark confinement of the ottoman with her toys,
frightened of the scissor man who cuts off the thumbs of children who suck them
– that small person, who even before she could read understood the power of a
book, has just liquidated half her own.
This
isn’t me . I am the adult outcome of the shy, awkward, only child, who instead of running
around outside in the garden, or clambering on dangerous arrangements of slide
and swing in the playground, or slapping bats against balls, or skipping down a
muddy lane, preferred above all else, as I still do, to stayed indoors and
read. Only children are no good socially. (A sister came along after eight
years, but by then the habits of solitude were set in the bone.) I found in
books my friends and my fantasy lands, and never looked to fiction for social
realism, or expected books to tell me about the life I led in suburban Liverpool,
with immigrant parents who muttered in an obscure tongue, and in the kitchen
made sure to find a use for every part of the chicken.
I was
enraptured by what disgruntled readers now refer to as matters ‘not relevant to
my personal experience’. By girls who wanted to become ballerinas and show
jumpers – though I was clumsy on my feet, and terrified of horses’ steaming
flanks and iron hooves. Edwardian children who walked up the Cromwell Road in
London, and imaginary creatures who lived in the sand. I was overly-familiar
with chairs that flew, with wardrobes that led to snowy woods, and holes in the
ground with hobbits in them. In books was
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