I have thousands of books, because that's what blue stockings have. They can put men on the moon but they can't make paperbacks lie flat.
Worst book in the world is a paperback that cracks along the spine and out come the pages. Even Penguins did that in the 80s, but I think they've got a lot better.
Probably the best book in the world is a little hardback, like all my old Teach Yourself books or little navy OUP hardbacks from the last century.
I adore this picture of Virginia Woolf and her little brother playing cricket. Look at her eccentric feet . They are exactly like Maggie Smith's feet when she played The Lady in the Van. Virginia Woolf wrote great things about pens in her childhood diary. She was so fussy about her pens. I have about a hundred pens.
I found this in an old letter that I wrote to my child in 1998 (my child who is just like an eccentric Virginia Woolf and writes sad stories like 'Terrible Tragedy in a Duckpond'). I apologise for the fact that I can't credit it. It's probably Hermione Lee, and if so, thank you:
. . . On Sunday, January 1907, just before her fifteenth birthday, Virginia Stephen, an angular, ungainly adolescent, picked up her favourite pen (and she was passionate about pens), the one with the thin sharp nib that bit into the paper as it crossed over it (but without leaving ink trails – a trait that was unforgivable in nibs). And she picked up her diary . .
.
. . . In 1899 we see her taking pleasure in the act of writing in and of itself, which is a necessary prerequisite if one is to become a mature writer. She loved to write for the sheer joy of passing pen across paper, and often described the effect of this nib, or that one, how this ink performed in comparison with another, whether or not her handwriting pleased her. She described the texture of paper and how she bound her pages together. If anything happened to one of her pens, she recorded it, and she speculated about the causes for its new (and bad) habit of leaving ink trails: usually someone (in most cases a servant) had been using it, or had dropped it. On 7 August 1899, for example, she describes how her joy in writing is lost when her pen does not perform as it should, but rather than describing herself as unable to perform the act of writing, she describes her pen as if it is, in fact, unwell. She developed very special relationships with her pens, with the tools of her trade, as so many professional writers do.
Reading material like this gives me such pleasure. My sad life!
From working through my list of things I said I'd blog about, I have now covered paperbacks that won't lie flat, but in truth that leads me on to tonight's real issue: how can I have a library? I fear that if I can ever afford even a very large wooden structure it will get damp, like every other hut, greenhouse, messuage, appurtenage, etc., in my garden. In the meantime most of my books are in storage near the motorway junction.
I do the lottery so that I can have a library built on one day. The lottery brings on a fit of anger so bad that my cells are fusing (only because of the boy in the newsagents), so I'll leave that till tomorrow and mark some essays.
As I write they are discussing, on Radio 4, the fact that universities have too many students and undervalued staff. My sentiments entirely.
