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Hoard as many books as you can; let them be your life’s companions

For me, books have been since childhood a kind of comfort blanket, shelved in the cupboard under the stairs

A private library and the desk of an author

In the north-west German town of Mettingen there lived a man called Bruno Schröder. By day he worked as a mining engineer, but in his spare time he had a consuming passion. For many years, he was a regular customer of his local bookshop. How good a customer was revealed on his death last year, at the age of 88. His modest house was found to be filled from the basement to the attic with books: 70,000 of them in every genre (except romance), carefully organised and catalogued.

The discovery presents his executor with a formidable problem. Such a remarkable library seems to demand to be passed on intact, but Herr Schröder and his wife had no children; and in Germany, as in the UK, second-hand books have negligible value. An offer of some €7,000 was apparently made, but then withdrawn. The future of the library remains uncertain.

Whether this strikes you as melancholy news will depend on what you think books are for. The late fashion designer, Karl Lagerfeld, whose own library numbered some 300,000 volumes, combined bibliophilia with commercial pragmatism.

His Paris bookshop, 7L, takes its motto from Thomas Carlyle: “The true university of these days is a collection of books”, but it also offers a library curation service for clients who presumably share the Revd. Sydney Smith’s view that there is “no furniture so charming as books”.

There was a good deal of this sort of thing (albeit of the prêt-à-porter rather than couture variety) during the Covid lockdown, when people took to conducting their WFH Zoom calls against a backdrop of books selected for their aspirational intellectual content, or pleasing colour co-ordination.

We bibliophiles have a tendency to deplore the use of books as set-dressing. We may reject our characterisation by the Guardian columnist, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, as “smug and middle class” members of the “cult of book ownership”. But our own motivations are perhaps no less compromised than the customers of Lagerfeld’s book curation service.

For me, books have been since childhood a kind of comfort blanket. In the house where I grew up, most of the books were shelved in the cupboard under the stairs, where a Narnia-esque barrier of coats hid a book-lined cave, both thrilling and alarming as it dwindled from the space beneath the landing to the bottom stair.

Reading in that cramped and stuffy lair bred in me a kind of reverse Marie Kondo attitude to books. In the most unpromising settings – telephone box libraries; the charity bookstall at our local station – I can infallibly find one that sparks joy.

But at some point, my books will turn from being my joy to my son’s burden. He is a reader, but not a bibliophile, and the three volumes of Jacques Hillairet’s Evocation du Vieux Paris with Nancy Mitford’s elegant bookplate that mean so much to me will mean nothing to him. Our libraries may be our self-portraits, but we should not expect them to be our monuments.

“Go, litel boke”, wrote Chaucer, concluding his poem, Troilus and Criseyde. One day I must say the same to all the litel bokes that have been my life’s companions. Wherever they end up, for someone they will spark joy, just as they once did for me.

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