My grandmother bristled with bookmarks. When she died, just short
of her 100th birthday, her bedside table still crowded with books in
various states of perusal, I discovered both that she’d left her library
to me, and that her passion for slipping bits of paper into books was
hereditary.
As a boy, I would spend hours looking at the
books in her house, enjoying the gold and morocco bindings, the cloth
coverings, the accumulated scents and feelings of more than a century’s
reading. She was always generous. When I was around 12, she lent me her
childhood copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. It was bound in
brown paper, as the dust jacket had been torn. At school, curious
masters would peep over my shoulder as I read, in case, as my Maths
teacher said, I was looking at naked ladies wrestling in mud.
It’s
not as if I am lacking in books. I am sent dozens of new volumes a
week, all bearing the eager promise of the newly produced. I would like
to say that I look at and read them all; you might also see a pig flying
over the rooftops of Kentish Town. I have already (almost) merged my
library with my wife’s considerable collection. I spent many happy hours
identifying the duplicates (
Catcher in the Rye,
A Room with a View,
War and Peace, etc); these were initialled (in pencil), and sequestered
in the country for weekend re-readings, as I can’t bear to be too far
from a volume of Saki for too long. Triplicates went into the cupboard
in the downstairs loo, or above my bed, for similar reasons. Have I
given away or discarded any? Not bloody likely.
I already have my
father’s childhood books; in his copy of Richmal Crompton’s
Just
William, his name was written in neat italics; I scrawled mine
underneath. My son has already done the same. I recently unearthed my
father’s Third Form Latin Vocabulary book, neatly printed initially, the
handwriting getting steadily worse as term progressed. It’s on my desk,
a reminder that education hasn’t change much since the 1960s.
And
now here are yet more books, returning with me in boxes each time I
visit my parents. Each volume cries out for attention: the lovely
bindings of Pope’s
Iliad (adding to the already ridiculous number of
copies of that book on my shelves), for example. These are confettied
with bookmarks: I have enjoyed trying to work out at what particular
line my forebears stopped and gasped at the elegance or beauty of a
line, enough to mark it for ever. I found a tiny, leatherbound copy of
Much Ado About Nothing, inscribed with my grandfather John Womack’s
name. The date was 1925. I had to look again, as this wasn’t far off his
5th birthday. I like to think of him carrying it around (it’s slightly
foxed), much as I, in my twenties, used to keep a miniature copy of
King
Lear, in case I got stuck on a train. I already have four Complete
Tennysons; now I have another. In a copy of his
Poems, from 1893, I
found a note: “Mr and Mrs Howard would be glad of Miss Muir’s acceptance
of the accompanying volume … as a slight token of regard, and thanks
for the kindness shewn to their daughter.” (That “shewn” almost floored
me.) This Miss Muir was my great-great-grandmother; her kindness, the
Howards, and their daughter long-forgotten. There are more bookmarks in
this Tennyson, clearly added in at different times, maybe even over the
decades. Why a particular part of ‘The Princess’ is marked I will
never know, but it’s fun to guess.
Musty tomes of Dickens,
covers all but falling off, bear the name of Henry Martyn, John Womack’s
grandfather (hailing from a godly Cornish family, one of whose members
was captured by Barbary pirates, and then escaped the Sultan’s harem
concealed in a barrel of rum). Martyn, a gentleman, played the organ at
a church, not far from where I now live in North London, where my
Womack great-grandparents got married. I like to think that their books
have winged their way home.
I’ve put a piece of paper into the
Tennyson, with a note about Miss Muir. Perhaps my
great-great-grandchildren will find it, and wonder too about those
lives, only a few handshakes away, and yet so impossibly distant, bound
together as the leaves of a book, each generation adding its own page.
As for my ever-expanding collection: I hope that they won’t reach the
charity shops and the second hand shelves. May they be found, still
bearing their bookmarks, in guest rooms and lavatory cabinets for ever.
