Finding Value
A few weeks ago I went to visit a friend. A lawyer or judge all his life, in retirement he has found time to enjoy what had always been a passion: second-hand books.
These are on the whole not the books that line the streets around Pall Mall and Jermyn Street; or that raise 5-7 figure sums at Christie’s and Sotheby’s (although I did notice a particularly well-kept set of Harry Potter first editions).
The house is instead a shrine to loveable oddities – some with no monetary value, some highly collectible. One-off publications of flora and fauna, known and lesser-known children’s books (a lot of these), biographies of long-forgotten colonels. He insists he is interested in everything and as such he has spilled out of his “den” to every surface in the house – books climbing up bedroom walls, the garden a self-made hodge podge of plastic boxes arranged to form ramshackle shelves under a tarpaulin roof.
26 has celebrated these kinds of collections in the past – the first Wordstock in which I took part, back in 2023, asked attendees to bring weird or unloved books from their shelves to share and pass on – but receiving a tour of this house and seeing his passion reminded me of their value.
So what have you got?
The Challenge
What is a strange book you have on your shelves? Why do you have it? Why does it matter to you? (Or does it matter to you?)
Tell me about an oddity from your bookshelf in anything from one sentence to 250 words – and if you can make sure to include the title and author, and perhaps even a short quote or extract, that would be superb.
Please send your scribblings to max@whiteweavearts.co.uk by Saturday 25 April. I look forward to reading them.
– Max Parfitt
If you haven’t yet, take a look at March’s Mini-Project: Place as Protagonist.