The trouble with libraries

I'm reading a copy of A.S. Byatt's Still life from the library which has been liberally annotated in blue biro with grammatical 'corrections'. Every incidence of the word 'whilst' has been changed to 'while', which is sort of fair enough. Every Oxford comma has been carefully scribbled out. But this reader isn't familiar with the subjunctive, so 'Tony insisted that Frederica come to hear Amis speak' gets modified to 'Tony insisted that Frederica should come'. 'As though this were possible' has been changed to 'as though this was possible'.

Further into the book the self-appointed sub-editor has been carried away with his or her own rightness. 'Last but two' becomes 'antepenultimate'. 'Nature ramble' becomes 'nature walk'. 'I think he might give up on me too' is weirdly changed to 'I think he might give me up too' which is quite a considerable change in meaning, I think. It's very disconcerting reading a book in which the author's language has been so assertively changed by a completely random person.

Too many books

Someone pointed me towards this Wall Street Journal article about owning books. It's a subject I've been thinking about recently, especially as we are moving house soon: I estimate I've got about five or six hundred books to move in my current flat, and another couple of hundred back at my parents' place. It's a source of mild friction between myself and my cohabitant: he doesn't believe in owning books, but gets them from the library. I also use the library (I am a member of eight libraries, at least five of which I don't owe massive fines to) but I like to own books. I think he feels mildly oppressed by the sheer number of books I own, and they do tend to get everywhere.

I'm actually much less of a book hoarder and compulsive book buyer than I used to be: I almost never buy new books these days, but I still find it difficult to pass a second hand bookshop without acquiring one or two. I had a massive clearout a couple of years ago when I got rid of around three hundred books, discarding the ones that I was never likely to read again, the ones which would be freely available in the library if I did want to read them again and the duplicate copies. Since then I try to limit my library to books I definitely do want to read or reread, and try and keep books that are freely available in the library to a minimum. I like this passage from Luc Sante's article:

It occurred to me that I had little need for most of the shrubbery surrounding the works of major authors: the letters (with one or two significant exceptions), the critical approaches (unless they are worth reading on their own terms), and any biography over 500 pages long (except maybe those by Richard Ellmann and Leon Edel). I also had no need for books with funny titles, books acquired only because everybody else was reading them, books with no value except as objects, and books that inspired a vague sense of dread whenever they caught my eye -- possible cornerstones of culture that nevertheless only solitary confinement would ever compel me to read.

I still have a lot of books. I like having them, I like being around them, I like the fact that I can go to the shelf and look up a half-remembered passage whenever I want to. It sometimes seems to me, though, that owning books is not recognised as the materialist act it actually is. Because having a library is seen as a cultural, educated thing to have, it's as though it's somehow morally superior to owning a lot of clothes, say. In some ways I'd like to be more like my partner, with his half dozen books and his library card.

Harry Potter again

I read the last Harry Potter, which I'm not going to go on about because I've already complained about HP at length here. It was workmanlike enough, tied up a few loose ends, and didn't need an editor as much as the previous two books had. [44]

The most interesting thing, though, was that Southwark libraries had loads of copies available on the day of publication - when the fifth book was published, the libraries in Newham where I lived at the time were booked up weeks in advance with requests for copies. Is this because competitive discounting means that people don't need to bother with the libraries any more because a new copy of the book to own will only cost a fiver? Or do people assume that the book is so popular that it won't be available in the library?

Libraries

I joined Camden Libraries in my lunchbreak - St Pancras Library is the closest, which is a ten-minute walk from work through lovely Bloomsbury backstreets. This brings the number of libraries I'm a member of up to seven:

Southwark Libraries
Newham Libraries
Redbridge Libraries
Camden Libraries
Senate House (and technically all the little research libraries around it)
The Poetry Library on the South Bank (currently still closed for refurbishment, I think)
Birkbeck library

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. -- Germaine Greer

£32.15

So I finally paid my library fines.

Sigh.