“I’m unpacking my library. Yes, I am.”
So began Walter Benjamin’s classic essay on book collecting. I’m not as crazy as he was. I have never had loads of money to spend on antiquarian literature, though I’ve always had a few pounds in my pocket to splurge on pre-loved books. Those few spare pounds have added up to a lot of money over the years, much to the chagrin of former girlfriends, as I’ve always been skint and terrible with money.
My collection is roughly sorted according to genre, and then subdivided into individual authors. I studied History and Politics at university, so consequently there are plenty of old textbooks and books I have collected due to my interest in the topics. I have multiple volumes by the Marxist historians Eric Hobsbawm, EP Thompson and Christopher Hill, the latter the once pre-eminent historian of the English Civil War - or “English Revolution” as he had it.
There was a indeed a revolution in the middle of the seventeenth century, but it was a total disaster, causing widespread mayhem and murder throughout the British Isles, most of all in Ireland, the scene of one of the cruellest episodes in our modern history, the Siege of Drogheda of 1653.
Hill tried to paint the civil war period as “England’s Turning Point” (the title of one of his essay collections), but if it did have a lasting impact on British society, it was probably that we wouldn’t get into that sorry mess ever again. And it put the British off mixing religion and politics. Religious fanaticism now belongs to the United States, where many Puritan zealots had fled to, and where their influence can indeed be felt today.
Hill’s work - indeed much of the output of his Marxist mates - has now been eclipsed and is at the margins of their respective fields. Nevertheless, Hill had an enviable intellect, steeped in the literature of the seventeenth century, and I look forward to finally reading his biographies of John Milton and John Bunyan.
In other historical studies, I cannot wait to read Mary Beard’s SPQR, a volume on ancient Rome, Niall Ferguson’s Empire, Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (fully: I dipped in and out of it as an undergraduate) and Andrew Roberts’ doorstop sized biography of Churchill.
I once shied away from reading writers of a different ideological bent to mine, but since encountering the work of philosopher Roger Scruton, it has encouraged me to broaden out. Here was that rare thing, a conservative intellectual, but of the Burkean sort rather than the Thatcherite. Scruton contended that the Thatcher revolution was not really conservative, for it didn’t conserve much.
It’s wonderfully liberating to read someone such as Scruton, whose interests include the aesthetics of music, German idealist philosopher GWF Hegel, French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and plenty else besides. I have his work “Green Philosophy” to finally wade through, so it will be worth seeing what his solutions to the environmental crisis compare to the mainstream.
Likewise in philosophy there are books by Friedrich Nietzsche that remain to be tackled (“The Will to Power”, “Daybreak”) as well as RG Hollingdale’s biography. Then there is Eric Fromm’s works on human aggression and on Buddhism, Karen Horney on psychoanalysis, as well as those books by CG Jung that I promised myself I would read. I daresay Jung and co would have plenty to say about book collecting as well.
And then there are the classics: Middlemarch, David Copperfield, Bulgakov’s The Master and Marguerita, Grossman’s Life and Fate … I have read my fair share of Dickens, Hardy, Melville and so on, but like most people there remain gaps.
Contemporary fiction I tend to read as I get it, notwithstanding the dubious literary merit of much of it. I cannot remember the last Booker prize winning novel that I read and enjoyed, for they seemed more akin to creative writing assignments than things people would actually like to read.
So what is my plan with all this then?
It is an excuse to clear the backlog and write a review or a discussion of one of the themes of the book, and perhaps highlight what it might mean for current events or those timeless concerns of human life that never go away.
I am doing this only for myself. If it grows, we’ll take it from there.
What I won’t do is sit down and pore over reference books. And that copy of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time won’t get finished. It is unreadable anyway …