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Rather like Lindsay Bagshaw in Anthony Powell\u2019s A Dance to the Music of Time, I have always believed \u201cbooks do furnish a room\u201d. It doesn\u2019t matter if they are stacked on a wonky IKEA shelf or exquisitely arranged in an ornately carved mahogany George III bookcase. Mine, some battered, some first editions, reflect the good, bad and downright dreadful of my life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
AA Milne\u2019s When We Were Very Young stands next to Desmond Morris\u2019s The Naked Ape, Fanny Hill\u2019s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure sits beside Chaucer\u2019s A Parliament of Fowls. The books you were forced to read are displayed alongside those you blissfully read and re-read. Gifts from long ago exes, inscribed with lyrical tributes to my youthful charms are flanked by dreaded O-Level texts and novels so forgettable I can\u2019t recall a single syllable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Elizabeth David\u2019s recipes, daubed with ancient blobs of gravy, lean on Larousse\u2019s majestic Mythology. Yeats huddles with Proust who has \u2013 ever since I moved in 24 years ago and stuffed my \u2018library\u2019 into the previous incumbent\u2019s shelves any old how, vowing to sort them into a sensible aesthetic arrangement when I had a minute \u2013 leaned comfortably against LM Montgomery\u2019s mesmerising Anne of Green Gables.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I like to think anyone perusing my agglomeration of books would know instantly if we\u2019d hit it off. I\u2019ve certainly been guilty of leafing through a stranger\u2019s tomes and deciding \u2013 purely because of their fondness for Saul Bellow or Barbara Cartland \u2013 that I love them to bits or have nothing whatsoever to say to them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Why, you wonder, am I musing about life-long personal libraries? The estate of the late, beguiling Snowman creator Raymond Briggs has donated his thousand plus collection of treasured books to Oxfam. Fans have swooped in to marvel at the 30 comic annuals from the 1950s and works by Aubrey Beardsley, EH Shepard, Charles Schulz and Posy Simmonds thought to have helped shape Briggs\u2019 own inimitable illustrative style.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I bet you\u2019ve guessed where I am going with this. Of course, I am pondering whether to inflict the disposal of my piles of well-worn books on my children when I shuffle off this mortal coil, or whether to start weeding out the duds now?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The problem is that I\u2019ve become somewhat wedded to my motley library. Each volume \u2013 I know this sounds stupidly sentimental \u2013 feels like a part of me. Yes, even the novels I’ve entirely forgotten.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n