The Aardvark Blog

To upgrade or not to update, David Low
29/11/2013

As a life-long book collector and sometime book dealer, I had early on to settle on a policy regarding that most difficult of all questions that confronts the bibliophile. Whether or not to upgrade when confronted with a better copy of a book that one already owns.

Such a decision is not to be taken lightly, for if one adopts the hair shirt approach one is likely to deny oneself the pleasure of owning a copy with a crisp unsunned dust jacket, or as with a recent purchase to be condemned to forever confront a dedication from mumsy to her little mouse. Yet on balance i do not regret opting for the puritan way, for in the constant churning of one's library one is left with too many tedious questions. What to do with the our spurned former loves. To sell seems like a form of betrayal, and yet there are only so many friends on whom one can bestow the gift of an unsolicited book. Besides what other path could one take working in such a noted puritan village as Brampton Bryan ?

Yesterday i was forced to deflect from my path, when into the shop was brought a fine copy of 'The Surprise of Cremona' by Edith Templeton. This was a book which I only read because of constant pressure from my friend Julia for whom it was a particular favourite. It is not a book which gives up its treasure easily. After each of the first few chapters I set it aside with pleasure, only being forced back to it by Julia's questioning. After 50 pages however my reading took flight, and I realised what my friend had known all along, that it is one of the funniest, sly and subtle pieces of travel writing memoir ever committed to paper. Julia has now been lost to us for some years, but memories of her shine bright amongst those of us who she blessed with her friendship. So now I have two copies, and am looking for a suitable victim on whom to bestow my own jacketless copy of this wonderful book.

Another book that came in yesterday was David Low's episodic memoir of bookdealing 'With All Faults'. Low describes bookdealing as it was before the blessing/curse of the internet, and in his memory the eccentricities and demands of past dealers and collectors come to life. My favourite story is of a good yorkshire customer of his who specialised in collecting eighteenth and nineteenth century erotica. One afternoon he arrived in with his very respectable wife just after Low had acquired a small collection of such books. The collector had unfortunately forgotten his spectacles, and for the rest of the day Low's shop in Cecil Court was enlivened by the sound of the collector's wife reading out the contents of the books in a broad Yorkshire accent.