Join My Book Club
One of the pleasures of columnising is that people write in recommending books. When I wrote a few weeks ago about mulligans - the system in golf which gives duffers a second chance - and the sad fantasy many have of being given a second go at their lives, Ivan Pope suggested a novel called The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. In it, he said, the Russian philosopher PD Ouspensky explores one of the chief themes in his philosophical work: the idea of "eternal recurrence", the notion, which also engaged Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, that we live our lives over and over again in a kind of endlessly repeating film, and that nothing will change unless we ourselves change, deeply and fundamentally. I duly added it to my list of titles to look for in second-hand shops, along with Van Loon's Lives - recommended by readers after another column - and a whole clutch of books some of which have been on this list for at least 10 years: the memoirs of Joseph Arch of Tysoe, for instance, and Michael Wharton's The Missing Will and A Dubious Codicil.
But that is 20th-century thinking. Nowadays you can buy almost any book that you want, as soon as you want it. Just dial into the internet - I tend to use Abe, though others recommend Bibliofind, now linked with Amazon - and platoons of books from all over the world will be mustered in front of you. There are 44 sightings of the Ouspensky on Abe, and 191 of Van Loon.
In all senses but one, this is an unconditional boon, both for buyers and sellers. As one bookseller told me the other day, it has put his small business on terms of equality with any second-hand bookshop across the world. Indeed, on better terms, since the prices from British suppliers tend to be very much cheaper than the offers, in greater profusion, from the US. The cheapest Ouspensky ($7.81) is in Solihull. There's a $8.59 version in Brecon and a $9.37 in Todmorden, while Magis Books in Loughborough have no fewer than five Ouspenskys listed at under $12.
Instant gratification: the highest value in that age of must-have, to die for, to kill for that is 21st-century life. But that's where the downside comes in. Internet buying eliminates the thrill of the chase. I never knowingly pass a second-hand bookshop, just in case it contains Arch, or Wharton, or my favourite quarry of all, one of the Shell Guides to Britain, in pursuit of which series I have haunted second-hand bookshops since picking up Shropshire in Ludlow in 1975. Ludlow, we wiseacres like to explain, is not necessarily the best place to search for Shell Guides to Shropshire, since that is where everyone else will be looking for them. "If you want a Shell Guide to Dorset", a bookseller in Blandford Forum once told me, "I'd go looking in County Durham. There isn't so much demand for them there." This advice is half right and half wrong. My County Durham comes from Carshalton, my Derbyshire from Somerset and my Worcestershire from St Andrews. But my Essex was captured in Colchester - for only £5: amazing - and my Isle of Wight in a bookshop called Mother Goose on the Green at St Helens, which alone is worth crossing the Solent for.
There are those who acquire old books for their value, shunning anything that has lost its dust cover or shows signs of "slight foxing", whatever that is, or for other exotic reasons that have little to do with the contents. The price of Van Loons on Abe varies from $2 for an edition in Maine to $75 for something more cherished and durable. There's a copy of Ouspensky that used to belong to Mary Norton, author of The Borrowers, on offer for $295 in Boston, Mass, though even that is well below the top American price, $475. But for those who, like me, buy for the content rather than appearance, there is usually plenty to choose from. How, then, can I now resist the temptation to go looking on Abe for other Shell Guides I have never yet even set eyes on, like Rutland (by WG Hoskins, no less) or Staffordshire - or even to complete the series?
Only, I think, by dividing books on the list into two. There are those, like Van Loon or Ouspensky, that one's never likely to chance on however many bookshops one visits, and whose purchase, if they are anywhere near as good as correspondents suggest, can be justified as a necessary enrichment of life. There are others, like the Shell Guide to Rutland, which will one day be there, glimmering in a dusty recess of some ill-lit shop in Macclesfield or Montrose, and whose very discovery will bring a sense of achievement that even the book may not match. Enough: it is time I set about reducing by one the stock of Ouspenskys in lovely literate Loughborough.
But that is 20th-century thinking. Nowadays you can buy almost any book that you want, as soon as you want it. Just dial into the internet - I tend to use Abe, though others recommend Bibliofind, now linked with Amazon - and platoons of books from all over the world will be mustered in front of you. There are 44 sightings of the Ouspensky on Abe, and 191 of Van Loon.
In all senses but one, this is an unconditional boon, both for buyers and sellers. As one bookseller told me the other day, it has put his small business on terms of equality with any second-hand bookshop across the world. Indeed, on better terms, since the prices from British suppliers tend to be very much cheaper than the offers, in greater profusion, from the US. The cheapest Ouspensky ($7.81) is in Solihull. There's a $8.59 version in Brecon and a $9.37 in Todmorden, while Magis Books in Loughborough have no fewer than five Ouspenskys listed at under $12.
Instant gratification: the highest value in that age of must-have, to die for, to kill for that is 21st-century life. But that's where the downside comes in. Internet buying eliminates the thrill of the chase. I never knowingly pass a second-hand bookshop, just in case it contains Arch, or Wharton, or my favourite quarry of all, one of the Shell Guides to Britain, in pursuit of which series I have haunted second-hand bookshops since picking up Shropshire in Ludlow in 1975. Ludlow, we wiseacres like to explain, is not necessarily the best place to search for Shell Guides to Shropshire, since that is where everyone else will be looking for them. "If you want a Shell Guide to Dorset", a bookseller in Blandford Forum once told me, "I'd go looking in County Durham. There isn't so much demand for them there." This advice is half right and half wrong. My County Durham comes from Carshalton, my Derbyshire from Somerset and my Worcestershire from St Andrews. But my Essex was captured in Colchester - for only £5: amazing - and my Isle of Wight in a bookshop called Mother Goose on the Green at St Helens, which alone is worth crossing the Solent for.
There are those who acquire old books for their value, shunning anything that has lost its dust cover or shows signs of "slight foxing", whatever that is, or for other exotic reasons that have little to do with the contents. The price of Van Loons on Abe varies from $2 for an edition in Maine to $75 for something more cherished and durable. There's a copy of Ouspensky that used to belong to Mary Norton, author of The Borrowers, on offer for $295 in Boston, Mass, though even that is well below the top American price, $475. But for those who, like me, buy for the content rather than appearance, there is usually plenty to choose from. How, then, can I now resist the temptation to go looking on Abe for other Shell Guides I have never yet even set eyes on, like Rutland (by WG Hoskins, no less) or Staffordshire - or even to complete the series?
Only, I think, by dividing books on the list into two. There are those, like Van Loon or Ouspensky, that one's never likely to chance on however many bookshops one visits, and whose purchase, if they are anywhere near as good as correspondents suggest, can be justified as a necessary enrichment of life. There are others, like the Shell Guide to Rutland, which will one day be there, glimmering in a dusty recess of some ill-lit shop in Macclesfield or Montrose, and whose very discovery will bring a sense of achievement that even the book may not match. Enough: it is time I set about reducing by one the stock of Ouspenskys in lovely literate Loughborough.
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