I was walking past the books for sale trolley when my eye was caught by a massive tome called Who Owns Whom 2011/11
Intrigued & surprised I took a look – can anyone be owned by someone? Can the word whom be applied to a non-human? Turns out to be about company ownership – I suppose a company may be a person in the legal sense? I know a university can be, at least for the purposes of national accounts.
Curiosity satisfied, my eye then fell on another interesting looking hardback – Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds, about the history of intellectuals in Britain. Since the English middle class mistrust of intellectuals had so recently been in my mind I could not resist, fell off the wagon, & bought it.
I am loving the elegance of the writing, the humour, rigour & delicate reproofs to scholars who do not come up to his standards of accuracy or reliability.
In the introduction he touched on another topic I was thinking about recently- judging a book by its cover:
'Any book about [English] intellectuals will be assumed to be short – should properly belong ‘in the company of treatises on snark-hunting or gazetteers of snakes in Iceland [sic]
It will already be evident, however, that the present volume is far from short’
It also a truly weighty tome – only 540 pages but printed on high quality paper it is practically a 5lb bag of potatoes. That fact in itself might have put me off buying it had I spotted it on the trolley on any other day.
But the sheer physical quality ofthis volume gives the immeasurable bonus of allowing it to lie open flat, does not need me to hold it up to be able to read.
Which also allows me the guilty indulgence of making my own (discreet) annotations. I was brought up to believe that writing in books was wicked, but changed my mind after discovering the joy of finding the marks of previous owners in second hand books which passed to my ownership, though I still think it a heinous crime to write in library books, or any book which does not belong to me.
And all for the bargain price of only 40p.
I am still trying to figure out what to make of the fact that Who Owns Whom, at £2, would have set me back five times as much.
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