His eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. But he could not read; that was a great pity. He pulled down one volume after another, turned over pages, contrived to make out many of the names. Later on he scrambled up on to the ladder. He wanted to know if the upper shelves had any secrets to hide. He tumbled off it and said: I haven’t hurt myself! The floor is hard. The books are soft. In a book shop one falls on books. He could have made a castle of books, but he regarded disorder as vulgar and, as he took out each new volume, he replaced the one before. His back hurt. Perhaps he was only tired. At home he would have been asleep long ago. Not here, excitement kept him awake. But his eyes could not even make out even the largest titles any more and that annoyed him. He worked out how many years he would be able to spend reading in this shop without ever going out into the street or to that silly school. Why could he not stay here always? He could easily save up to buy himself a small bed. His mother would be afraid. So was he, but only a little, because he was so very quiet. The gas lamps in the street went out. Shadows crept along the walls. So there were ghosts.During the night they came flying here and crouched over the books. Then they read.
Tag Archives: books
Excerpt from Auto-da-Fé, p.14-15
Abandoned dedications
Extrapolated from an earlier post, “Abandoned Dedications” now has a page of its own. Eventually it will build into an archive of fleeting and forgotten regards. Bare as it looks now, the archive is growing and will continue to do so as and when new dedications come my way.
In the mean time, by way of repatriating the dedications with their original sentiment, they are available to download as full page pdf’s. They are given warmly and to be received as anonymously as they are delivered.
Anonymous guests
Dedicated to you but you weren’t listening. Research conducted this afternoon shows there to be a direct correlation between the level of understatement in the front verso page of a book with the degree of intimacy in the author’s inscription. The understated (blank) verso has a very sincere dedication; the overstated a very superficial one. The title page that falls between these two opposites, the one that is functional and austere, perhaps as expected, has the most generic and formal.
These are from a collection of books that I have either found, bought second hand or that have been loaned to me and I have yet to return. All have been signed by the author and dedicated to a reader – a reader sometimes known, a reader sometimes anonymous, but never me, I am simply the recipient and the guardian of these secondhand wishes.
Image in context (2)