Reading between the lines

‘Voltaire and the Sun King rolled into one’ is how Elizabeth Longford has described her Oxford tutor Maurice Bowra.

If the promoters of the e-book have their way, personal libraries of the future will consist of intricate cyber-memories holding thousands of volumes conjured up at the touch of a finger, while the reader, bounded in an electronic nutshell, will count himself a king of infinite space. Gone will be the pleasures of sitting in a book-lined room watched by the ghosts of the garrulous dead, gone the unique feeling of companionship and awe that the accumulation of books over a lifetime can inspire. Gone too the harmless and prurient delight of peering through someone else’s shelves in order to catch a glimpse of his secrets and foibles. Fortunately, I believe, such a future is yet but a glint in the technology-mongers’ eye and, however strong the competition, I trust that our homes will house books for however long we continue to claim the tag of homo sapiens.

There’s still hope then, I’m certain, for those among us who believe that a good way of knowing someone is by snooping through his shelves. If the things we eat and the company we keep betray, we are told, who we are, how much more so the books we read or don’t read. Few relationships are as intimate as that of a reader with his books; therefore, how refreshing to know, for example, that the prim children’s author, Constancio C. Vigil, kept an excellent collection of pornographic literature in his study. How surprising that the undeservedly forgotten George Moore banned encyclopedias from his library. How interesting that Ernest Hemingway owned a complete set of A la recherche du temps perdu in his Key West bungalow.