Missing Books - A Wander through One Man's Library (Paperback)

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SO, WHAT IS IN A LIBRARY?

Sun, 6 Nov 2016 | Review by: Phillip T.

SO, WHAT IS IN A LIBRARY? BRIAN TELLS US AND PRESENTS HIS PARTICULAR INTEREST FOR ALL TO SEE AS DICTATORS REMAIN FRIGHTENED BY BOOKS! An appreciation by Phillip Taylor MBE and Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green Chambers Brian Harris is known to many in the legal world for his outstanding contribution to our profession and for his dedication to the life and works of Rudyard Kipling. His sad goodbye to some of his books strike a chord with many of us in the same position as we downsize our own personal collections. His latest short paperback is a fascinating gem of a book for book collectors and clearly a book for book lovers of which we fit that bill nicely. The trouble is that the love of books is a bit of a dying art today with the renaming of libraries as ‘learning centres’ with all the electronics, and the general rebranding of what we knew as ‘libraries’ in our youth with the arrival of the internet and the Fourth Industrial Revolution for the digital world. Brian tells us in his publishing blurb that “great and wondrous things can happen around books. Boswell met Johnson at Tom Davies’s bookshop in Covent Garden. Karl Marx planned to remodel the world in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Jorge Luis Borges conceived a universe in the form of a vast library”. He says that as a child “I spent my Sunday mornings in the Battersea Reference Library awaiting my mother’s Sunday roast.” We wonder how many others of his vintage share the same memories (we do!) but not, obviously in Battersea. He goes on to make an important social (and political) point saying that “the loss of a library can be a catastrophe”. The counterbalance is that Brian has made the most of his library by “inviting the reader to take a trip through the contents of his bookshelves, past and present - from children’s books to science fiction, from poets ancient and modern to ground-breaking forms of biography, from literary humour to books on life’s deeper issues.” It’s a bit like visiting the massive National Trust piles and making a beeline for the library so we can sniff out the reading habits of past worthies… but it’s always great fun. Brian picks out a storyline describing how the writings of an English rope maker helped bring about two of the world’s greatest revolutions, and how a book moved Abraham Lincoln to take up the cause of emancipation. Of course, Brian has views on many topical matters including the “importance of reading to the growing child, the inconvenience of over-weighty volumes, and when plagiarism can be justified.” Interesting stuff although we liked the final word when he comments that he had hoped his eReader would fill the gap left by the ‘missing books’. Some hope, as we miss the look, the smell and the touch which makes them objects of desire and we certainly do miss some of our missing books and have more than the occasional pang of regret when we no longer have them, but we do have “Missing Books” to cheer us up. Frankly ebooks are not the future, merely an addition to the creation of “the book” which we hope will remain with us forever. Thank you, Brian!

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