Gates to, or escapes from, reality

This anthology is a sheer delight, full of good things. It gets off to a splendid start. On its dust- cover is a picture of a dog with a light bulb in its stomach; underneath is a gem from Groucho Marx: ‘Outside a dog a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog it’s too dark to read.’ Reading this book is like riding a good horse through an interesting landscape. You get a glimpse of familiar great oaks: Wordsworth at breakfast cutting the pages of Burke’s works with a knife greasy with butter. You ride past newcomers like Helena Hanff, shocking her friends by casting into the waste- bin books she will never read again. You spot old friends like Tony Hancock.

Authors, like actors, are narcissists. They talk about their own writing like actors talk about themselves and other actors. There is, consequently, an abundance of writing on why authors write. To Evelyn Waugh it was a compulsion: ‘I must write or bust.’ Anthony Trollope shocked Henry James by treating writing novels like making shoes, a job to be polished off before breakfast. This anthology is about books, their appearance, even their smells, about the mania for collecting them, above all why, where, when and how we read them. Pregnancy, the editors claim, is the very best time to read; but this a privilege denied to half the human race.

Many like reading in trains, but for Nancy Mitford’s Davey to do so is a most fearful strain on the optic nerve centres. Others suffer from a form of narcolepsy. Some can get most out of a book glued to a chair in a public library; others find the presence of others reading distracting. Keats’s ideal was reading outdoors in a garden; others prefer a library where old books and their bindings enhance the pleasures of reading.