READING BETWEEN LINES OF BOOKS’ OLD OWNERS
Second-Hand Stories
Josh Spero
Unbound €22.50
★★★★★
Second-hand books have two different stories to tell. One is contained in the print, and the other, more shadowy, in all the scribblings, thumb-prints and assorted marginalia.
Heaven knows what a future second-hand bookbuyer will make of all the underlinings and question marks and exclamation marks on the books I have reviewed. No doubt he will conclude that the previous owner was a lunatic.
Books about books are invariably interesting. A few years ago, an author decided to read Oscar Wilde’s entire library of 2,000 books. One or two were torn around the edges, testament to Wilde’s curious habit of tearing off the top corner of a page as he read it, rolling the paper into a ball and then popping it into his mouth. Others were stained with wine and jam, as he loved to eat and drink while reading.
Adolf Hitler also liked to make his mark, adding strident exclamation marks when he saw fit. An author who trawled through his library discovered many underlinings, including one beneath the sentence ‘geniuses are only recognised after their deaths’. Opening one of Hitler’s old volumes, he made a singularly unap-
pealing discovery. ‘Tucked in the crease between pages 160 and 161’ he came across ‘a wiry inch-long black hair that appears to be from a moustache’.
Inscriptions can be equally haunting. I have a book by the great Indian sage Nirad C Chaudhuri, dated March 3, 1971, signed with the words: ‘Do not attribute this book to me: I am only the medium – it is the troubled spirit of my people which speaks in it through me.’
Now a writer called Josh Spero has had the bright idea of looking through the second-hand books he bought as a Classics student and finding out about their previous owners. His aim was threefold: to celebrate the book as a permanent object, particularly in the age of the internet; to explore the lives of past owners; and, finally, to show how ‘even the lowliest secondhand item carries with it the life and story of another’.
In Second-Hand Stories, he contacts 11 past owners of his books and asks them about memorable happenings in their lives, and how their classical studies have influenced them. Inevitably, it is a bit of a fishing expedition, and one or two fail to bite. ‘I’m quite happy living a nondescript life with my family, cats and allotment,’ says one, a lawyer just three years older than Spero.
Another, an elderly man who worked for an unnamed government department – presumably Britain’s secret service – replies by letter, gently but firmly, that ‘the constraints of the Official Secrets Act, by which I am still bound even in my retirement, forbid me from discussing my work and activities there, except to say that, unsurprisingly, my classical studies bore no relevance to my work...’
These two are by far the least forthcoming but, for all the book’s many virtues, a slight sense of strain, of so-what-ishness, permeates the whole project. The only one whose interest in classics led directly to real-life odyssey is Mark Richards, who in his youth embarked on a three-month, 1,500-mile rowing trip from Greece to Georgia in a reconstructed Bronze Age galley. He and his crew were attempting to recreate Jason’s voyage in the Argo, which is the sort of dotty expedition that makes life worthwhile. Richards now works in computers.
Though Second-Hand Stories never quite adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts, it remains full of good things. It is also beautifully produced.
The final chapter is the most moving, concerning a university contemporary of Spero, James Naylor, who took his own life, aged just 23. A week after his death, Spero and other friends went down to stay with James’s parents, who insisted that they each take a memento of James from his study. Spero spotted a book on Sophocles that he himself had given James, who had written ‘JEM Naylor, Easter 2004’ in pencil. ‘I was pleased he had had use of the book,’ he writes, ‘but I would gladly have never had it back. I wish that I could have never had it back.’