Monday, 25 July 2016

My latest book, entitled Missing Books A Wander Round One Man’s Library begins:


Dictators are frightened by books. The fourteenth century Dominican Friar, Girolamo Savonarola thought that books were objects of such temptation to the God fearing folk of Florence that they needed to be burnt. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Propaganda Minister, thought that books, particularly those written by Jewish authors like Albert Einstein, were 'evil spirits of the past' and a danger to the Nazi's New Order.  On the night of 10 May, 1933 he organised the burning of some 25,000 books in Berlin's grand Opera Square. It was to be a tragic confirmation of Heinrich Heine's comment of a century before that 'wherever books are burned people will end up being burned too'. Books that are feared so much by the wicked must have something special about them.
In fact, great and wondrous things can happen around books. Boswell met Johnson at Tom Davies’s bookshop in Covent Garden. Karl Marx planned to remodel the world in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Jorge Luis Borges conceived a universe in the form of a vast library. And as a child I spent my Sunday mornings in the Battersea Reference Library awaiting my mother’s Sunday roast.

This little work is a wander through some of the books that have at one time or another adorned my little library. Necessarily, they deal with those topics that have interested or moved me. I have some acquaintance with the law (which is the subject of one chapter), but beyond that you must take my thoughts for what they are worth.