Pimp My Dante

Hoorah for Lynn!
She's saved me the bother of actually writing about anything today by asking that I post a few pics of some of my books to tie in with the DPP folks' Books Theme Day.

Some of you know that I kinda like to read.
A seven hour per day commute, plus reading myself to sleep at night and my weekends spent in the big old reading chair all add up to a whole lot of book time.

Plus I don't watch TV. It's Radio 3 and a good book for me every time. The picture is always so much better.

So anyhoo … This is the part of my dining room cum office where I keep some of my favourite books.

Ever since college I've been trading up my tatty and much-loved paperbacks for hardbacks and then fine editions, like the facsimile of Shakespeare's First Folio sitting here next to my Kelmscott Chaucer.

If I'm going to read a book over and over then it may as well look and feel nice.
This is Shakespeare's Sonnets tarted up in leather and crushed silk, which looks either blue or deep red depending on how the light catches it … Groovy!

Pimp my Dante. Morocco and moiré silk bindings.

Here's my big old Chaucer. It's in the original Middle English and I love reading aloud from it on winter nights.
The book was produced by William Morris and Edward Burne Jones with their exquisite designs bringing the words to life. Click on any of these to make 'em a little bigger.

I have a fair few Bibles knocking about the place, but this is my favourite if I want to read the Gospels.
Eric Gill was probably our greatest stonemason and engraver (he also designed fonts, such as Gill sans).
The Golden Cockerel Press commissioned him to produce this so that people could read Jesus' words in a book fit for them.

Here's an apt passage for the coming season.

Gill's beautiful, stylised illustrations and hand-carved fonts fit the text perfectly.

Enough of that. Let's browse some shelves.
Here be Dickens. My primary winter fodder, together with Tolstoy.
That's Smollett's History of England - the 1756 edition - on the middle shelf, from back in the days before those pesky Colonials rebelled.

Up here we have more Shakespeare and Winston Churchill's war books from The Great War and World War 2, together with his History of the English Speaking Peoples.

Hey ho … Moving on: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a nice vellum binding with Hodgkin's brilliant Barbarian Invasions books (in Roman imperial purple) taking us through from the fall of Rome to Charlemagne.

Under those are T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Pepys' Diaries with a few battered old Dickens first editions I've had for donkey's years.

More general fiction, plus Darwin's writings to annoy our Godbotherers and various other odds and sods.

We'll whizz through the remaining bookshelves in the dining room.
Here's some art stuff.

Architecture and cookery and general nonsense.

Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, Tacitus, etc. You get the picture.

English history, Stanley's In Darkest Africa next to Livingstone's diary and on the top shelf the lovely Complete Peanuts series that Fantagraphics have been bringing out, two per year.

Look out! It's the God shelf.
My big Bible, a couple of Qur'ans - including Tarif Khalidi's stunning new translation; more stuff to freak Shan out (The Gnostic Gospels and The Book of Common Prayer) together with a smattering of reference works on Christianity and Islam and associated bumf.

And to go with religion … politics.

Marx, Cuba, Palestine, good guys like Benn, Lenin, Cromwell, Arafat, Castro and Ho Chi Minh; bad guys like Hitler, Stalin, Kissinger and Nixon.
Plus Chomsky on the Yanks.
Fun and games for all the family.

My totally trashed old Roget and his chums.

More stuff on American history and the folly of war.

And more lessons from the past from which nobody appears to have learned a damned thing.

A good shelf for general reading. Orwell, Steinbeck, Swift, Melville, Hugo, Marquez, Eco, Conrad, Solzhenitsyn et al, including To Kill A Mockingbird (for Robyn) and Maya Angelou.

More tosh, including some of those fun old Punch compilations that seem to find their way into everybody's library.

An odd shelf; from Einsten to Mark Twain.
It really annoys me when people say "I read A Brief History Of Time but didn't understand it".
Twats!
It is the best introductory physics book for twelve year olds ever written. Stick Hawking alongside Newton's Principia Mathematica, Richard Feynman's quantum physics lectures, Einstein's own book on Relativity and Schrödinger on genetics and you have the basics for understanding what the fuck is going on.
I honestly can't understand people who can't understand this stuff.
Sheesh!

Moving on again … Some old paperbacks including my much travelled and trashed copies of Dylan's Tarantula, The Catcher In The Rye and a bunch of Burroughs.

Some old Solzhenitsyns and general stuff.

Moving away from the dining room, there's this crap in the box room, plus around twenty big boxes of books that have nowhere to sit (there are many more boxes in the attic).

Some stuff from the landing bookshelves.

More stuff tucked away upstairs including all of my Saramago, a bunch more classics and some modern Japanese and American fiction.

Yet another bunch of books in a cabinet.

My Japanese textbooks sitting on top of the tallboy in my bedroom.

And there are many, many more volumes scattered around the house.

So, Lynn … psychoanalyse me from that lot.

Books (like guitars) are lifelong friends that have never dumped me.
I kinda like books.