Like all junkies, my most important relationship is with my dealer. He must be cajoled and wheedled to remember me first, I must pay any price he asks and be grateful for the chance, and in no circumstances can there be the faintest whisper of complaint about the quality of the supply.
To be sure, bibliomania is not a comfortable addiction. To feed my craving for modern first editions, including my beloved Williams and Jenningses, takes a fifth of my income – more than I spend on food or my children. I have lost entire weekends in a haze of book fairs and pilgrimages to remote bookshops (which typically prove to be closed). Friends and family have felt obliged to shun me lest I drag them down with my sordid behaviour; my burblings of cracked hinges, crushed spines and discoloured front-end papers. I am abandoned to the company of quiet men in cardigans.
But at least I have my books. To hold, as owner, a mint copy, perfect as the day it was published, of an elusive Patrick O’Brian or an early Kingsley Amis (his Gollancz period, of course) makes all privations worthwhile; more, it is to experience earthly bliss. And the great thing is that the quest need never end. If by some miracle of fortune I should ever complete my O’Brians and the rest, beyond them stand Evelyn Waugh, Biggles, Ian Fleming, Enid Blyton …a cornucopia of endless longing and disappointment. Not that my habit has been acquired entirely without wisdom. I am no longer the artless youth who threw away the dust-jackets thinking them so much gaudy clutter, or mistook a First Cheap Edition for a First Printing.
I can also claim uncharacteristic prescience in deciding to collect first editions of contemporary novels (modern firsts) a year or two before the bandwagon began to role.
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