Discarding books with abandon
Book Purge Eleven — August 28th 2016
I’ve been back from France for three days. As I wrote in last week’s report from the front line of book purging, I wanted to crack on with freeing myself from the overbearing claustrophobia that comes with full shelves. I decided to do away with the daily count and dive in with sleeves rolled up.
So I picked out 26 books almost without thinking. And there they are. Quite a mix, too, from Biggles to Poker to Political History to an old French dictionary.
It’s safe to get rid of the latter because I brought back from France the full Collins Robert French Dictionary that was hogging a whole shelf to itself in the small apartment.
Harpoon At A Venture by Gavin Maxwell was a set text at my old school in Edinburgh. It tells a tale of basking shark slaughter that would be rather frowned upon nowadays — and rightly so. Maxwell attempted to set up a factory for processing the meat in the Inner Hebrides just after WWII — and it failed.
The Secret Of Crete is about Knossos. I bought the book while living on Crete. It contains a lot of conjecture about the ‘true’ purpose of what is believed to be the Minoan capital and the site of the maze in which Theseus defeated the Minotaur.
The other books all reflect periods of my life in which different interests held sway. Poker was my basking shark fishery, although I’m pleased to say that it cost me a lot less than bankruptcy to discover that I wasn’t going to make a living from it.
I fully expect next week to hit 50 at least. That’s the target: fifty books to go and a further weight lifted from my shoulders.
