ninme

The Times - Books speak volumes about life’s milestones Valerie Grove

Purchasers of houses do not like books. They make houses look old and tired. Lose the books!” I heard this advice in one of those “how to sell your house” makeover programmes, addressed to the hapless owner of a house (like mine) stuffed with books.

Oh my god! Someone else has noticed! I’ve been wondering about that for years! These catalogs one gets, they’re full of all the most useless furniture because all they’re designed for is a single banana leaf in a vase and a small white Mac Book. There’s no books! In fact, the Ikea catalog is the only place I’ve ever seen books actually photographed with the products. As they’re meant to be. Not in vertical stacks, in diminishing size order, of no more than twelve slightly worn Bauhaus books. How does one vacuum under those, one wonders?

The madeover television house never has books. It has a single candle in the fireplace and pointless sculpted objects, and pebbles, and clever lamps – but nowhere to put books. Or hang your hat or swing your cat. It doesn’t have a larder or walk-in storage cupboard, desk, bike or dog basket. Just a leather sofa, a plasma TV screen and acres of wooden flooring between.

Just look at any advert for a “stunning” new apartment: “Incorporating pure silk wall-coverings, bespoke furniture sourced from around the world and an integrated audio-visual system, this apartment is one of the most sophisticated and stylish in London. Rent £4,000 a week.” No visible bookshelves.

You know what I think? I think they’re just designed to be character witnesses for the soulless yuppy that lives with them. As we’ve been shopping for furniture, you can’t find an arm chair, or a wingback chair, or a lounge chair, or anything designed for specific qualities or needs. They only carry “accent chairs”. I thought, if you wanted an accent in a room, you’d hang a painting. Not plop down $1900 of wood, springs, and dead cow, weighing ten tons and as wide any American rear end, just for something to look at should your eye ever fall upon the corner of your living room. Which it won’t, because you’re always at work, at happy hour, or falling into someone else’s place late at night. Should someone ever fall into yours, that’s what these apartments are designed for. Can you tell I’ve recently been touring the starter-housing market?

My books’ endpapers are covered in scribbles, review notes, lecture notes; they have yellowing reviews tucked inside their torn covers, dedications on fly-leaves, authors’ signatures. Every book – from Molesworth and Just William and Stuart Little, to political Pelicans (now history) to dark green Viragos and illustrated Folios, to first editions bought at auction when I was feeling rich, to paperbacks oil-stained on Greek beaches and jotted with hilarious menu items – is a memory. Books have tentacles because of what they represent. A book-lined room announces that here is a world of silence and slow time, the obverse of “a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness” (Steiner again). …

So let’s start the cull. I reach out at random from my desk and find The Kemsley Manual of Journalism, published in 1950, unopened since childhood. Opening it again I find that it is signed by (Viscount) Kemsley! And the chapter on foreign news is by Ian Fleming! I google it and find it is a “collectable”: £10 to £75. But no, I will not flog a book that belonged to my pa, who had in 1950 just achieved his ambition to be a cartoonist, on a Kemsley paper. Books are more than just books.

ninme nods in complete understanding

Although I would never write in my books.