Volumes of desire

Friday September 4, 1998

My hunt for a first edition Barbellion ended today with a trip to the Taunton bookshop where they’d located a “good, clean copy” for me. Clean is the word. Eighty-nine years since it was printed and not a mark on it. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What on earth happened to this particular copy that it didn’t get read in all that time? Perhaps it was bought as a present, or on a whim, leafed through and put aside. Accident or disinterest, I’m positive it’s not been read. It feels too clean, the pages are too smooth. Unless, like the famous used car it had only one careful owner who handled it so gently as to leave no trace.

I seem, in this one regard at least, to have become a “collector”. I now have seven copies of the book, all in different editions. It’s a peculiar thing for me to do. I can’t read more than one copy, let’s face it. All my life I’ve tried to travel light, to be independent, not weighed down by possessions. Yet, there they stand on the shelf where I can see them every day and rejoice in my ownership. And the awful thing is that if I were offered another edition tomorrow I’d beetle off to add it to the collection.

This is a new bookshop, recently opened by an Anglo-American couple, refugees it would seem from San Francisco and Los Angeles and typical of the wacky generation - my generation. Spirit children, dazed still from their Berkeley existence in the sixties, moving less gracefully and carrying a lot more flesh but still at least partly in orbit. Jade and coloured stone jewellery set in low grade silver. Long hair, greying and reaching out with crazy tresses to a lost world.

Somehow the place feels out of kilter. It smells different, feels different than an English provincial town bookshop. Even on a dim rainy day it has something of the sun about it.

When I stepped back outside it felt as though a whole set of audio filters were removed, exposing me to a more ragged sound spectrum.

I’ve felt a little disjointed ever since.