Real life: buying books before it’s too late

As well as buying vinyl records, I have begun collecting three-dimensional books constructed of paper that you hold in your hands and operate manually by turning their pages over. I buy them from bookshops.

There are a few of these emporiums scattered across the country. My favourite one is called My Back Pages in Balham, and it has just put up a sign saying that it is closing down. This means I have only weeks to ransack its cramped shelves to loot them of all the books I have ever seen in there that I want to own. I contemplated telling the nice Irish man who runs it that I will order a lorry and simply take away the lot.

Every time I walk past and see the Closing Down Half Price Sale sign I look at all the beautiful, forlorn hardbacks in the window and feel like I need to rescue them, as if they were unwanted puppies at a dog home.

But in the absence of a house big enough to accommodate them all, I went in there in a panic and started pulling books randomly off the shelves and heaping them up in my arms. ‘There, there,’ I thought, as I took each one as the one next to it cried out to be chosen, too, ‘don’t you worry. You are going to a nice home…’

I came out with a selection featuring Stephen King’s Insomnia, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, and The Collected Short Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle. Sadly, the entire haul came to £8.50. And that tells you everything you need to know about the likelihood that books will continue to exist.

And it makes me all the more convinced that I must hoard them.