Having spent most of a week transforming my late husband’s study for a different purpose, I’m obsessed with the way we think of books. That I should have kept books we both enjoyed – the Terry Pratchetts or Winnie-the-Pooh – is understandable, but why did I still have the technical stuff about warfare or flying I didn’t manage to give away? The 50 years or so of bound Punches inherited from my grandfather… Well, yes, they are quite fun to browse through, but there’s so much that gets treated almost as a sacred text which is nothing of the sort.
We were brought up thinking it sacrilege even to underline important passages in a book one is studying; annotating stuff needed for work seemed vaguely naughty. But it can’t always have been so. I was once asked by a very distinguished publisher to let him have a couple of books “with your marginal comments” – it seemed wicked, but historians blamelessly rely on long-ago footnotes.
It’s as if whatever bits of our schooling we’ve forgotten, we’ve kept the sacredness of the written word with the mantra that “books do furnish a room”, which is rather like saying you only read the Bible for the stories. And what I don’t know, though somebody must, is whether this religious respect for the written word extends to Kindles and such, or not. At least they can’t, surely, tiresomely take up 20 untouched shelves in an empty room.
What do you think? Have your say below
