Lost Libraries—Biblioclasm: a deadly sin
Dedicated to the Shekera family, my brave Ukrainian friends, who conduct their lives under a hail of Russian missiles.
In the years preceding the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, two significant private libraries were established in Northland: the Anglican mission libraries of Kerikeri and Waimate North. I was three-and-a-half years old when my family moved to Kerikeri, and even during those pre-school years I was fascinated by books. My dad, always keen to encourage my reading, pulled a local history book from a shelf and read out an entry. ‘Every day, Bishop Selwyn walked ten miles there and back to consult the Waimate North Mission library.’ Surprised, I asked why anyone would insult a library. My father loved telling that story, but offences against libraries still trouble me.
This morning I learned from friends in Ukraine that an important state library had been destroyed in a Russian missile attack. It was the second such act of desecration this year. In those two attacks alone, 60,000 books were destroyed. Precision-bombing enables a modern military to avoid excess civilian casualties and cultural desecration. It is a matter of choice. The Russians’ decision to target the destruction of libraries has been a choice, then. The reason books are targeted is clear. When you attack books, you attack culture. This not only denies immediate access to the books, it also erases cultural memory. It is an attempt to blind the future.
The wilful destruction of books has been on my mind lately, having been reading several works that detail the systematic destruction of irreplaceable ancient libraries. Among them, the Great Library of Nalanda Mahavihara (India), the Great Library of Alexandria (Ptolemaic Egypt), the Pergamon Library (Hellenistic Anatolia), Ashurbanipal Library (Mesopotamia), the Imperial Library (Byzantium Constantinople), the Houses of Learning (Babylon), the books & archives (Qin China), the Imperial Library of Luoyang (Han China), the Library of Pantainos (Roman Greece), Emperor Hadrian’s Library (Roman Greece), the Library of Antioch (Roman Syria), the Library of Serapeum (Roman Egypt) … and so it goes on.
Throughout history, countless monastic, state and scientific libraries have been destroyed by kings, religious bigots and pillaging armies—a horror story burning its way through the wick of time and refusing to be consigned to the past. While not all of these ancient libraries were destroyed intentionally, most were. This wilful destruction is motivated by a simple truth: if you control knowledge, you can control the narrative.
The 20th century began with the Siege of Peking, where Western forces looted and destroyed the Hanlin Academy library. Thirty years later, the Nazis were burning books written by Jews, followed in quick succession by the bombing of libraries by the Axis forces, the Allies and the Japanese. Sadly, in my lifetime the destruction has continued. Pol Pot is an egregious example, being so keen to eradicate and re-boot history that he burned teachers and academics along with the books. (It was the United States’ carpet-bombing of Cambodia that lit that touchpaper.)
In fact, throughout the second half of the 20th century, civil wars, cultural revolutions, communal riots and cultural arson have continued, each iteration burning books like latter-day Savonarolas.
This century, fundamentalist zealots have burnt numerous priceless texts in places like Mali (Timbuktu), Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu are destroying libraries right now—both Kiev and Gaza have had libraries bombed this week. It could also be argued that America is heading down a similar path with its ideological purging of books.
There is a term for an individual who burns books: a biblioclast. The act of destroying a library is biblioclasm or libricide. I learned this from a book in my own library, now quite rare: Holbrook Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania. Over its 550 pages, it traverses every aspect of bibliomania—collectors, biblioklepts, hazards, cures and biblioclasts. And, of course, the opposite of the book-hater or book-destroyer—the bibliophile.
The Anatomy of Bibliomania references a much earlier book titled The Anatomy of Melancholy, by the Elizabethan scholar Robert Burton. I possess a Victorian edition of that book. My edition is described as a ‘new’ publication, the original having been lost for many years, before being rediscovered in a private library. It is a delightful book with a spectacular frontispiece, and is not as gloomy as the title would suggest. This is because hundreds of years ago the term ‘melancholia’ could be used to describe a variety of moods. And this is something we wouldn’t know if works like Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or Shakespeare’s plays had been lost, as they very nearly were.
For example, these shades of meaning are evident in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: ‘It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels ….’ The destruction of libraries evokes in me a melancholia in the Shakespearean sense.
Texts lost and found
On the plus side of the ledger are the amazing texts from ancient libraries which continue to be discovered. Texts emerging as palimpsests or fragments of papyrus found under desert sands or in walled-up caves. Modern technology is proving invaluable in revealing the once-lost words they contain. And the palimpsests are proving to be especially intriguing.
The word ‘palimpsest’ derives from the ancient Greek word ‘to scrape off.’ And so it is fitting that modern technology is helping us to visually ‘scrape back’ these artefacts’ layers to reveal other buried layers of meaning: proof that—because the parchment on which texts were transcribed was so valuable—it was indeed common practice for older texts to be scraped off a book or a scroll, and new texts added in their place. A Christian liturgical text could overlay a work by an ancient Greek philosopher, which itself would be a new rendition of earlier versions. The most famous of these is the Archimedes Palimpsest. The story of its discovery, and of the science that revealed the hidden text, is as exciting as any modern-day mystery novel.
The word ‘parchment’ is derived from Pergamon, a city in present-day Turkey, which once boasted one of the classical world’s greatest libraries. It is to the librarians of Pergamon that the invention of parchment has been attributed. These craftspeople monopolised the trade with their sturdy new product made from stretched animal skins, and in time put the makers of the less-durable plant-based papyrus out of business. Later, Mark Antony gave the contents of the library to Cleopatra, and the Pergamon scrolls ended up in the Library of Alexandria. After that, neglect and a civil war between Octavian and Mark Antony contributed to the scrolls’ eventual loss.
Even more amazing are the finds located in what appears to have been an ancient Egyptian rubbish-dump. Tiny pieces of papyrus stuck together in wads, hidden as the sands shifted. Radiography and spectroscopy techniques are now revealing these ancient texts, too, which contain information about pyramid building, private letters, and fascinating details about the lives of ordinary citizens. All of the above are gifts to us, remnants from greater ancient libraries that have been lost over time.
Thanks to archaeologists, scholars, bibliophiles, disobedient citizens and an irregular army of treasure-hunters, the erasure of books has proven difficult. Human curiosity militates against such folly. When, for example, the Qin Emperor ordered the destruction of all books and state records in 213BCE, scholars and poets carefully hid their books. It is believed that at least one copy of every book in that library was saved thanks to those ancient book-lovers. Among them is The Book of Songs, a collection of poems that predates the Qin dynasty.
The earliest known, dated, printed book, is The Diamond Sutra. It was printed on 11 May 868CE. It had been hidden in a cave along with 40,000 manuscripts and paintings during a period of social unrest in the Northern Song Dynasty. There it lay in the Mogao Library Cave (Cave 17) for 900 years until a Taoist monk discovered the entrance in around 1900CE. A Hungarian-born British archaeologist and explorer, Aurel Stein, heard of the cave’s discovery and acquired (i.e. bribed a guard or stole) the most precious of the manuscripts for the British Museum. The Diamond Sutra is a priceless document, and especially so to Buddhists like me. The text was supposedly communicated to a monk by Shakyamuni Buddha in around 500BCE.
The bibliophile Bishop Richard de Bury was born in England in 1287CE to a family of Norman descent. As a young man he became enmeshed in the intrigues of Queen Isabella and her lover, Roger Mortimer, to depose Edward II. A wanted man, de Bury fled to Paris and hid until Edward III took the throne, upon which he returned to England and rose rapidly through the court ranks. Among de Bury’s many roles were Dean of Wells Minster, Bishop of Durham, Lord Treasurer and Lord Chancellor. This eventful political life did not, however, prevent de Bury from becoming an obsessive book collector; indeed it helped him exploit every opportunity he could to rescue and acquire books. It also presented him with opportunities to make the acquaintance of fellow bibliophiles, including Petrarch, whom he met while he was an emissary in Rome.
Moreover, de Bury used his influence and the state coffers to collect books and manuscripts from near and far, spurred on after observing how badly the ‘ignorant and neglectful’ monks treated their books. In doing so, he depleted his own wealth but enriched the nation. After his death, de Bury’s library formed the basis of great English libraries, including those now in Oxford. Several books bear his name, including the delightful Philobiblon. It is one of the earliest books about creating a library. (I have a nice facsimile copy.)
In the meantime, the Chinese had invented woodblock printing and, after that, moveable type. But it took a further 600 years before Johannes Gutenberg developed the printing press in the West. The potential of this form of mass printing for the dissemination and democratisation of knowledge was immediately recognised and feared by the churches and despotic kings, but it was too late: the age of mass media and influencers had arrived. Nevertheless, the fact that books could now be printed in large numbers and distributed quickly did not prevent them from disappearing, with those earliest printings—known as ‘incunabula’—now rare.
Save or purge?
Not all books are deserving of longevity, true; but the process of culling should be an organic one. Public taste, although not always right, tends to take care of this. The works of popular Victorian writers like Rider Haggard and Marie Corelli—writers who were lionised in their day—have quietly disappeared from shelves. Conversely, Dickens and Conan Doyle, who began writing cheap train-reads, have ended up as literary giants. And at the same time, another, much earlier literary reputation was undergoing a revival. Poet and playwright William Shakespeare, while immensely popular in his day, had soon fallen out of favour due to the rich poetical language and his use of metaphors as much as the embedded political undertones. It wasn’t until the Romantic era, a time of re-evaluation, that his plays began to be popularised again.
In my library, I possess works by authors such as Austin Dobson, Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang, Richard Garnett and Osbert Sitwell. None of those once-popular authors is of interest to today’s readers, but their books survive in my library, and I am fond of them all. Books, good or bad, can offer insights into the past. There is currently a tongue-in-cheek fad for trashy, 1950s pulp fiction. What will be collectable in years to come is difficult to gauge.
Books of all sorts can become sought-after many years after publication and often obsolescence. A first edition, first printing, first release of Ian Fleming’s Bond novel Live and Let Die, for example, can fetch up to US$30,000 — arguably because no one thought it worth hanging onto when it first came out. That story and others like it once had me rummaging through car-boot sales. I don’t do that anymore, because I am now a recovering bibliophile (although I suffer the odd relapse). I am more likely to be tempted when confronted by new publications these days.
This brings me to the present, and with it to the painful realisation that I must now purge many of my own books. My library is a timeline of me, and most of the books in it were lovingly selected. Some for their typographical beauty, binding, illustrations or rarity, but most because I wanted to read them, each one reflecting my tastes over time. It is a comprehensive library of the humanities. I am not a scholar; in fact, I left school at age 16. I was educated not by teachers, but by my books.
My descent into biblioclasm
All ageing book collectors are forced to confront the mortality of their libraries, and the inevitability that most of these libraries will die with them. A private library is an extension of a particular collector’s personality, and, even though the collector’s best books could theoretically survive for a thousand years, the libraries themselves seldom do. Their fate is to give us joy, then quietly vanish. This is how rare books become rare.
Some books are more accessible to modern readers than others, and that’s why special collections and private libraries are valuable. They often hold unusual books. They are repositories—seed banks, if you like—telling us who we were, and perhaps who we could be or should not be again. Private libraries are quirky. Each booklover’s library will, over time, have developed a distinct personality of its own. They are places filled with concealed treasures, and each of those treasures itself obscures an untold story—but will those stories ever be told? For the famous, the answer is yes; for the rest, it is unlikely.
Yet there is nothing that brings on the cold sweats in a bibliophile more than the realisation that their precious library, one that has been amassed over a lifetime, might soon be tipped into a landfill. There are surprisingly few antiquarian booksellers left in my city, and so the rats wait patiently for the day when they can nest in an association copy of a rare first edition. An early Boswell or a private-press treasure makes just as good a nest as a badly written self-help book.
A friend once told me that he often lay awake at night, the prospect of his collection being disbursed to philistines too much for him to bear, or at least to allow peaceful slumber. I didn’t tell him, but the prospect is worse than that. Many of those beloved books are more than likely to end up in a skip. He was worried that a sharp-eyed antiquarian bookseller would obtain his best books for a pittance and sell them on at a huge profit. My fear is more aligned with reality. That a buyer or an auction house would be shown the collection, select one or two, and declare the rest unsellable. Books should be read. The idea of a book-dealer making a killing at my expense is of little concern, so long as the books are read and loved.
But again I return to the idea that value and insight can lie in a particular collection or curation of books as much as in the individual volumes. For this reason, the catalogues detailing writers’ own book collections have always interested me, as their libraries reveal as much about them as their literary output. I have a few such items, including bibliographies, holdings and acquisition records. One of these is Carew Hazlitt’s description of Charles Lamb’s library, complete with bookseller receipts and a record of the books Lamb either lost or gifted. To me, it is a marvellous thing, but who today cares about the painstaking labours of William Hazlitt’s grandson? Who outside of those inhabiting university English departments even knows who Lamb and Hazlitt are?
The 17th-century collector and first English biographer, John Aubrey FRS, was confronted by what he termed a ‘plaine trueth’ regarding his library. He feared that his manuscripts and books would be lost after his passing, wondering what would become of his ‘pretty things.’ And while he was a modest man, fortunately for us he shared with his less-humble contemporary, Samual Pepys, a taste for gossip. Luckily, the writings of both survived, and the world is glad of it. In Pepys’ case, he feared the opposite: that his often scandalous observations would be read. His scurrilous scribbles were thus carefully encoded, and it took until 1820 for the diaries’ code to be broken—by a vicar based in Baldock, Herts. One wonders what must that vicar have thought when he read the more salacious passages?
I myself have been the beneficiary of another’s collecting, having many items from Pat Lawlor’s library—signed books, association copies, monographs and ephemera. Lawlor was a journalist, editor, bookseller, writer and noted bibliophile. His name is almost forgotten these days, but he was once a vital part of New Zealand’s literary fabric. Among his friends were the writers Robin Hyde, James K. Baxter, R. A. K. Mason, A. R. D. Fairburn, Eileen Duggan and others. Lawlor had worked as a journalist and editor on numerous publications. Later in his life, during hard times, he operated out of a small office called the Beltane Book Bureau, in the Nathan Building, in Wellington, from where he sold parts of his valuable collection and even model aeroplanes just to keep the wolf from the door.
I have a bundle of Lawlor’s papers from that time, neatly bound with white tape, ephemera, print samples and bookplates. I also have books from his library. He was a founding member of PEN (New Zealand), and was partly responsible for getting the Wellington council to protect Katherine Mansfield’s childhood home. It was only after his library had been sold and dispersed that it was realised what an important national treasure had been lost. On the fragments I retain of his marvellous collection, his spidery notes on various endpapers are wonderful; his defacement an enhancement.
Nicholas Basbanes, in his book A Gentle Madness, referred to the 1980s as the ideal time to collect rare books. Even in New Zealand, it was a high watermark for collectors. I collected during that period, and rare and affordable items could be located if you scanned the market. Basbanes reasoned that it was not until the 1980s that the great Edwardian collections came onto the market. These late Victorian and Edwardian collectors were the stuff of legend; the collectors known as ‘bookmen.’ (Women collected, too, but kept a lower profile.)
Private collections can be treasure troves. The books in them might not have immediate monetary value, but they hide there, biding their time. Every so often, a delighted researcher will unearth a rarity in an unexpected place, or find a long-lost letter from a literary giant tucked inside granny’s cookbook.
A librarian in a central public library once confessed to me that many of their significant holdings, those stored in the special stacks, had never been properly examined. When a dealer purchases items from a private library, those books are seldom properly examined either.
I have a first edition by a once-important author (the aforementioned Dobson) with his handwritten corrections throughout. This had been done so that the printer could make the corrections before the second printing. This carefully annotated copy was passed down for over 100 years; each owner an author, who handed it on to another. Eventually, it ended up in Pat Lawlor’s library. Lawlor in turn gave it to the craft printer Ron Holloway, who gifted it to me. This is both an association copy and one with impeccable provenance. Will it be of interest to someone? Who knows?
Rarity is created by ignorance and carelessness, although a cunning few have tried to manufacture rarity by hiding or destroying all but a few copies of a work. Capitalising on rarity is also what forgers do. The book world has known a few of those. Those books are collectable, too.
Ethics, dilemmas and e-books
Library ‘stacks’ are storage areas where books are stored separately from the shelves the public can readily access. Some libraries grant limited access to their stacks, but generally these areas are accessible only to the librarians. Unofficially, stacks are where books are sent to die. It is an aged-care facility for forgotten print. Private libraries also have stacks (in the guise of cardboard boxes, attics or basements), and I have such a section, one that is shamefully out of control.
A disciplined collector will catalogue their acquisitions and holdings. A wealthy collector will hire a librarian or an undergraduate to do that for them. For most, though, creating a catalogue is a task seldom completed. The only list of holdings I have is a failed attempt, later appended to a ‘to-do’ list, which in turn was lost in the archives of an old, inoperable computer.
It is a fact of life that all modern libraries must discard books. Our National Library is in the process of purging almost everything in its holdings that is not related to New Zealand. There will be an attempt to re-home a few, offer them to overseas libraries, but most are destined for the shredder. I once purchased a handful of gorgeous half-bound leather books that had been purged from the Parliamentary Library, among them an Andrew Lang.
Having more books than I could accommodate, I knew the day of reckoning was here; it was time for a serious book purge. I needed a nudge to get started, and the nudge came when family members paid for a nice built-in bookcase. It was not easy sorting the books into ‘keep’ or ‘sell’ piles, but I did so, worried about the burden my children would face if I neglected the task. They live in other countries and have their own collections.
As I thinned, I loaded quite a few into rubbish sacks and paid a junk collector to take them away. He assured me that he would re-home as many as possible to care homes. Others were just binned — the dismembered and the commonplace. I had become a biblioclast.
I had also set aside what I thought were the more saleable discard items. I loaded them into my car and visited a few second-hand and antiquarian booksellers. There are very few remaining in Auckland, and those that remain face the same storage problems I do. One shook his head sadly at the sight of my boxes and rejected most of them. The ‘baby boomers,’ according to him, are the last book-collecting generation. His shop and the containers behind his shop were stacked with boomers’ collections. He had reached his limit. The second buyer I approached was closing down; now, a few months later, both are gone. Two of the premier Wellington buyer/sellers, John Quilter and Rowan Gibbs, have also left the business. All that remains is the drawn-out hassle of selling piecemeal on TradeMe or eBay.
There are still millions of books being written and sold: the book is not in decline. The problem is not their number, but their distribution and the disruptor technologies (here we must factor in the ubiquitous e-book). The unpalatable truth about e-books and online sales is that they have caused fragmentation, a disjunction between seller and buyer. The pleasure of drifting into an antiquarian bookshop, inhaling the smell of old books and embarking on a voyage of discovery is fast becoming a thing of the past. The serendipitous pleasure of stumbling upon a treasure that you were not looking for has been overridden by Amazon rankings. Bots instruct us what to buy and which online sites stock their ranked recommendations.
When you buy an e-book, you get ugly fonts and appalling typography because the lines fall in ways not intended, with the text either squashed or stretched out to fit the allotted text grid. No rivers of prose meandering down the middle of a craft paper page, no wide margins, no texture, no deckled edges. T. E. Lawrence, when publishing Seven Pillars of Wisdom, set up a camp-bed in the printery so he could be there to ensure that the lines fell exactly on the page as they should. I published a physical poetry book, but when an e-book version came out the lines fell in all the wrong places. Poetry lines must flow exactly as intended; it is word breathing, and HTML cannot do that.
And worse, when you buy an e-book you have only purchased a limited right to read it. It is not yours to give to a friend, and, if you read the fine print, the rights holder (the e-publisher) can remove it from your collection at any time. This harms the second-hand book trade. Why buy an out-of-print book when an e-book beckons? This is a disaster for those selling books like mine, so I will wait for the finer weather and construct a roadside bookstall in the hope that the offer of free books will attract a passerby or two. My last recourse will be a skip.
A new bookcase and a library of the humanities
The inevitability of book destruction is a depressing topic, but there is a ready cure. Install and populate an additional bookcase to delay the inevitable. As long as I can remember, I have wanted a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, white bookcase. Now I have one. It was constructed by Ronnie the builder, a delightful man who measured and ruminated in turns, often singing as he worked. We loved having Ronnie in the house.
My youthful self had made bookcases using pilfered bricks and planks, and, although they did the job, they rarely rose above waist-height; any higher invited collapse. Later, I purchased a few second-hand bookshelves, the sort designed for people who have no real understanding of book sizes. The shelves were either barely able to accommodate large-format trade paperbacks or designed for large-format encyclopaedias.
A bespoke bookshelf is a thing of wonder, designed around a collection and able to accommodate the various formats. Some years ago I designed and built a large bookshelf for the living room, where it still has pride of place. My design criteria, though, were focused on aesthetics, not structural integrity, so the shelves are so long that they sag in the middle. They require central support, but that would necessitate de-booking, and so that project, like my cataloguing attempts, is parked on a ‘to-do’ list.
The most exciting aspect of acquiring library space is the fun of sorting and populating the new shelves. I have my own method, and so, although I have the deepest respect for the time-honoured system, I intend to take a different route. The first-known librarian, Demetrius, was the head librarian in ancient Alexandria. He preceded Dewey by over 2,000 years, creating a cataloguing system that libraries rely on today. Demetrius and Dewey notwithstanding, I will use my own system. My librarian friends will be dismayed when they read this, which is why I have not sought their advice. Spy-fiction writer, Mick Herron, has similar views which he revealed during a recent New York Times interview. When asked how he organised his books, he quickly replied: ‘How would that work?’
It is a topic that I have often considered, but there is no one right answer. When it comes to book organisation, I am influenced by Jonathan Swift, who wrote ‘The Battle of the Books’ (1697), and especially by Gilbert Fabes, who wrote ‘The Autobiography of a Book.’ Both Swift and Fabes have pointed out the dangers in letting incompatible books sit side-by-side. If you subscribe to the view that books are living entities, then their psychological welfare becomes a consideration.
Mine is a library of the humanities, and almost none of my collection falls outside of that sphere. It is the sort of library that National Party ministers despair at. There are no inspiring books by industrialists, practical guides to wealth creation or books to prepare you for the job market. Instead, it is awash with history books, jazz books, the works of dead philosophers, canonical literature, and poetry. Worse, there are books on books, lots of them. As far as I know, prospective employers never quiz job applicants on the finer points raised in John Carter’s enquiries into 19th-century book forgery.
My new shelves are bright and cheery, and not the best setting for my antiquarian books. Those are situated on more austere shelves, with the best of them cosseted within a glass-fronted case. I wanted a place for the books I consult often, my overflow poetry, ancient and modern history books, and hard-to-categorise books such as my Buddhist commentaries and sutras. It is an everyday library. I will now hunt for a suitable chair to place beside it, and if I want to research something I will sit there, in a place where books recommend other books.
Many of my favourite paperbacks are there, most of the spines looking well-worn. Almost all of the (now tatty) Penguin Modern Poets series, a few scuffed old Dickens hardbacks, none of which look as though they mind sharing shelf-space with shiny new books. I have a Joan Didion section reclining between Umberto Eco and the Beat women poets. They are among friends, and that is what counts.
I do have a few broad categories, such as ancient Greece and Rome, or canonical literature, but I bend the rules and never arrange them in alphabetical order within the section. They are not the 801.4 sort of books. Placing Browning close to Baudelaire just feels wrong. Unlike an engineering library, a library of the humanities will never date—unless the rats are given access.
In this 21st century, I am Eliot’s old man in a dry month, waiting for rain—who knows which of these lovely books will survive the drought? I wrote the poem below a few years ago; later, performing it with a notable jazz musician. It feels fitting to end this essay with it.
You have to wonder why some words,
lose their way, can’t find an ear,
but fall short, while others hang,
suspended in a spider’s web;
words set aside, then quite forgotten,
stuck in an orphanage for lost print,
dying by degrees in some yellowing stack,
while expurgating rats move in.
Musician’s words, though, stay intact
as pencilled charts inscribed like runes.
Though the meanings are lost to all
but the cats, you have to wonder at that.
And why some words just dance your soul
while others hit with a dismal clunk.
They miss their mark, they splutter
and crash, you have to wonder at that.
John Fenton, Spring 2025
Aubrey, John. Lives of Eminent Men: Literary lives (Hesperus Classics).
Basbanes, Nicholas. A Gentle Madness (Henry Holt).
Bracciolini, Poggius. Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis (trans. Phyllis Goodhart Gordan) (Columbia University Press).
Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy (Chatto & Windus).
Carelli, Marie. The Marie Carelli Birthday Book (Hutcherson & Co) (my great-grandmother’s copy).
Carter, John. ABC for Book Collectors (Granada Publishing).
Dalrymple, William. The Golden Road: How India transformed the world (Bloomsbury).
de Bury, Richard.The Philobiblon: A treatise on the love of books (Chatto & Windus, miniature facsimile).
Dobson, Austin. A Bookman’s Budget (Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press).
Eliot, T. S. The Collected Works of T.S. Eliot (Faber & Faber).
Fabes, Gilbert. The Autobiography of a Book (The Elzevier Press).
Fenton, John. Dancing Between the Notes (Ex Libris Publishing).
Gosse, Edmund. Gossip in a Library (William Heinemann).
Hazlitt, W. C. The Lambs: Their lives, their friends, and their correspondence (Elkin Mathews).
Henri, Adrian, Roger McGough and Brian Patten The Mersey Sound (Penguin Modern Classics).
Holloway, Kay. Meet me at the Press (Griffin Press); signed by the author and printer.
Jackson, Holbrook. The Anatomy of Bibliomania (Faber & Faber).
Lang, Andrew. Adventures Among Books (Longmans, Green & Co.).
Lang, Andrew (ed.). The Ballad of Books (Longmans, Green & Co.); Parliamentary binding.
Lawlor, Pat. Confessions of a Journalist (Whitcombe & Tombs).
Lawrence, T. E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Doubleday & Doran).
Minsky, Jeanette. Sir Aurel Stein: Archaeological explorer (University of Chicago Press).
Netz, Reviel and William Noel The Archimedes Codex: Revealing the secrets of the world’s greatest palimpsest (Phoenix).
Shakespeare, William. The Comedies of William Shakespeare—Victorian facsimile of First Folio (authorised by Royal assent).
Stein, Aurel. The Thousand Buddhas (Project Gutenberg PDF).
Swift, Jonathan. The Battle of the Books (Chatto & Windus).
Tylden-Wright, David. John Aubrey: A life (HarperCollins).
Vallejo, Irene. Papyrus: The invention of books in the ancient world (Knopf).
Waley, Arthur. A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (Constable & Company).
Wood, Michael. The Story of China (Simon & Schuster).
John Fenton is a bibliophile, jazz writer, poet, retired trade unionist, Zen Buddhist and tea head. He lives in the Waitākere Ranges with his partner and two cats. He fled school at age 16 and was thereafter educated by his books.