This week I received two copies of my books in the post: Bedside Companion for Book Lovers and A Nature Poem for Every Day. Book Lovers is on its second printing and Nature Day (the book’s everyday title) is on its eleventh. Huge thanks to all the bookshops, gift shops and museum shops which have sold them, particularly, obviously Hatchards at Piccadilly, St Pancras and Cheltenham. Also to everyone who has bought and, I hope, enjoyed them. Lastly thanks to everyone at Batsford, without whom they would not exist.
I am often asked which anthology I most enjoyed compiling. The answer is usually the one on which I am working at the time. I really enjoy creating them; I know it is a job but if I didn’t enjoy it I’d find something else to do. I do however have favourite pieces within each collection. Here are three from Book Lovers.
Books, Books, Books From Aurora Leigh, Book I, lines 832-844 Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret-room Piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large, - where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books! Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
I have multiple copies of many of my favourite books: nine of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, eight of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April and two of Monty and Sarah Don’s Fork to Fork (one with my gardening books and one in the kitchen). This extract (almost) justifies them.
Three Copies
No gentleman can be without three copies of a book, one for show, one for use, and one for borrowers.
Richard Heber (1773-1833)
[Richard Heber’s library contained over 15,000 books and spread over eight houses. He was one of the eighteen founders of the Roxburghe Club.]
Arthur Humphreys worked at Hatchards from 1881-1924, first as a Junior Assistant and later Partner. On October 18th 1881 an advertisement was placed in The Publishers’ Circular: ‘Wanted, a Junior Assistant, age 20 to 25. A good writer, quick, active, industrious and thoroughly respectable, with some knowledge of the retail trade. Apply, by letter only, to Messrs. Hatchard, 187 Piccadilly’ Arthur Humphreys was successful and he started on the princely sum of one pound a week.
‘A new and vast world of books was now opened before me. Whereas up to the day when I entered Hatchards the books I had handled were trifling things…here in Piccadilly I saw the best of everything. It was, of course, bewildering at first to a boy who was only sixteen.’ He also wrote books: The Ideal Library, which recommends the books from 1899 and 1904, which Hatchards have reprinted – I wrote the introduction – and this, The Private Library.. Both are interesting, delightfully opinionated and, occasionally useful.
