It would be seemly, at my time of life,to have achieved a tidy house with family photos prettily displayed and Doulton figurines on polished tables. The problem is the books. Instead of sitting tidily on the bookshelves they overflow and drift all through the house, at a guestimate more than three thousand of them.
We have tried to reduce the number. The children have each taken their personal stash and we have taken boxes to the local charity store. But more flow in, on birthdays and at Christmas, and the 'must have' treasures, other people's discards found at the charity store.
I must take the matter in hand. Perhaps if I begin to assess them, one at a time, on this blog, I will come to terms with why I have kept them, what I must keep, and what can be given away. It is an eclectic,well thumbed, two person collection amassed over fifty years. It includes Doris Lessing, Rumer Godden, Kazuo Ishiguro, Enid Blyton, Damon Runyon, anthologies, gardening books, nice old dictionaries....you get the picture.
Now, having resolved, where to begin? My bedside table I think.
The first book that comes to my hand is a tattered, falling apart little paperback edition of Tolkien's 'Tree and Leaf. It contains his definitive essay 'On Fairy-stories' and an early short story 'Leaf by Niggle'. I think it is out of print. If I come across an intact copy I will buy it. But this one stays on my bedside table,I love it. It fits my hand so nicely and always falls open at the right page. "Faerie is a perilous land and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold".
Another keeper is Final Harvest, a collection of poems by Emily Dickinson. What is there to say that has not already been said about Emily Dickinson? It is a must for my bedside, a joy to open at random at any time. "This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me". The perfect way to close my first post to the blogosphere.
