Alexander Chancellor: The Kindle is marvellous, but it cannot satisfy an addiction to books

My brother John’s great book sale, about which I wrote on this page a couple of weeks ago, finally took place at Stoke Park last weekend, and it went far better than I had anticipated. Admittedly, I had expected little. For a while I had even feared catastrophe. John, who is 86 and in poor health, seemed to think that he alone could sort out and price some 6,000 books in three weeks, even though he liked to stop and read them as he went along. But he has always had an enviable gift for arousing in others an urge to take care of him; so many helpers duly appeared, unprompted, to offer their services for free. It is certain that without them — and in particular without Ruth Moushabeck, an experienced bookseller, who, with her partner Craig, slaved away for a week sorting and pricing and carrying books from place to place — the sale would have been a complete shambles.

As it turned out, it was not. The books were efficiently arranged — the more valuable ones on tables in one of the two Inigo Jones pavilions, where John held court in a large armchair wearing, strangely, a blue woman’s hat; the cheaper ones in an adjacent marquee, where coffee, tea, wine and sandwiches were also on sale — and there were so many friends and relatives chatting up visitors and taking their money that John had little to do except to be charming, which he is very good at. The sale was spread over two days, Saturday and Sunday, which could have been a mistake, since the book dealers arrived early on Saturday in the hope of snapping up bargains, so that at least three quarters of the takings were made by lunchtime on the first day. However, the second day enjoyed glorious weather, which showed the park and the pavilions in the best light and gave a dreamy quality to the whole event.