Sandstone Press

Eating a peach at midnight

Posted by RLD on 2nd August 2009

This blog comes to you not from RLD, but from MAF, taking over for one week only while pressing matters at Sandstone Towers keep our MD occupied.  This is partly because we have spent rather more time at Our Place in the Country than at S. Towers of late, and he needs to catch up with real work. 

New homes always need things done to them, and this one has needed more than most.  I knew it would all cost more and take longer than first estimated (or hoped); what I didn’t foresee were the burst pipe creating a stream of water from the light fitting in the living room or – after a couple of days of being lulled into a false sense of security (‘I think the bubbles in the ceiling are going down a bit’) - the descent of said ceiling to the floor.  Fortunately landing only on furniture and carpet, not me or a cat.

All the planned work is more or less complete, and I’m now at the happy stage of putting up pictures and rearranging dishes in cupboards.  I worry sometimes that the bright student of the English degree at Aberdeen so many year s ago, once inspired by Johns Donne or Keats, is perfectly content now with domestic trivia and Radio 4 in the background.  Maybe we all come to this: books, china, as Larkin observes, adding with wry self censure, a life reprehensively perfect. Only that suggests order, a satisfaction with inanimate and beautiful objects only.  There is very little perfect about my house or my housekeeping, and nothing even half way decent about my carpet fitting or door hook fixing.  That is why I had to get the men in, to do the major work, and much of the minor.

Yes, this place has been full of men for weeks, kindly pointing out the flaws in my house and my plans, and then putting the problems right.  They have stopped for tea in their vans, reading the paper in companionable silence, for in the early days there was no water in the house, and no electricity except what was rigged up for their power tools. 

Now the men have gone, and I’m left with some snagging to be dealt with, the insurance people to agree a contractor for the ceiling, and when that is all done, my books to arrange.

There is good reason for leaving this till last.  I unpacked the books of course, and got them onto shelves and bookcases, but after a few moments trying to put the fiction written by authors with names beginning with B in order (what a lot there seemed to be) I gave up and flung them onto the shelves any old how, so I could get the empty boxes flattened for the removal men to collect. 

Now here’s a strange thing.  I hadn’t quite enough room for my books in the old house.  Some of them, I admit, were lying on their sides on some of the shelves, but not all the shelves, and not all that many.  I have moved to a house with as many spaces for books as the last place.  Yet, mysteriously, the fiction has multiplied.  They are now two rows deep in the biggest bookcase and I have run out of space.

I did try to throw out books.  Discovering that I have twice bought Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography of Jane Austen (I thought it seemed familiar when I read the second one) and indeed several other books, I began some rather desperate weeding out.  The biography section, though, fits its bookcase, I don’t really have to reduce it, and the second edition of a book usually has some revisions while the first can have a nicer cover, so really I need both of them.

I’ve done better with poetry; I can be ruthless with that.  Why not just keep the classics, I asked myself, and did a fine job till I came to two or three modern poets I thought were classics already, so they sneaked in.  Then there were books by people I actually know – it would be terribly rude to throw any of them out.  Anyway, the poetry fits its bookcase too.

It’s fiction that’s the breeder,  authors and books jostling for space, spilling out onto the floor, turning on their sides and lolling on top of rows of other novels.  All these separate stories, most of which I’ll never read again. On tired nights, feeling dispirited, I’ll turn to Rumpole of the Bailey or something by Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Taylor; every few years I read all of Jane Austen again, especially Mansfield Park, and Middlemarch, the finest novel I know.  But all the rest?  A few.  Some of them I know I did read once, but I can’t remember a thing.  Some I gave up by page 25.  Why have I kept them?  Even if I miraculously become as bright again as I must have been at 22, I will never go back to them.  Life’s too short, I say, casting another novel aside unfinished, I can’t be bothered, and it’s a fine day, I should be outside gardening.  Then I re-read something I love, because I know it won’t let me down.

So the problem of the books, and where to put them, and whether to put them anywhere, remains. For another day.  Meantime, it’s late, and Radio 4 has moved to World Service while I’ve been writing, and eating a peach, and thinking about books.  Which for an editor, is of course entirely suitable.  But perhaps not how to get rid of them, since at Sandstone we are adding to the total number all the time.  How careful we must be then, to make sure we publish books people will never throw out, even when their shelves are as crowded as mine.