I Murdered My Library (Kindle Single) by Linda Grant Page A

buried his in the garden. From inky words, roses rise.
Some writers carry them round with them when they go to readings and literary
festivals, and flog them for cash, but I don’t have either the car or the
chutzpah. I have made use of my attic eaves for all these years, where books
hunched amongst the inflated Swiss ball and dumbbells (unused), the guest
futon, the suitcases and the packing case containing items I had not got round
to opening since I moved here in 1994.
    No
books in the living room. Those walls are reserved for pictures, although it is
the site where the reading actually takes place.
    For
many weeks before I left the building, I sorted them out. The decision about
what would stay and what would go, live or die, began with kindness, and ended
in rage and ruthlessness. I have a pair of library steps I bought in an antiques
shop in Cornwall and schlepped back to London, and I climbed them every
afternoon and scanned the shelves. What I saw, swelling with self-important
pride, was evidence of how I had constructed my own intellectual history through
reading. Here is Proust. Here is Jean Rhys. Here is Milton. Here isn’t Henry
James, because I have never been able to remember the beginning of his
sentences by the time I get to the end.
    Here
is J.K Rowling, here is Jilly Cooper. This is a library which tells you
everything about its owner, which doesn’t conceal the shameful reads, the low
taste. Here are first editions, bought at abe.com, of my childhood favourites,
the Sadlers Wells ballet and riding books of Lorna Hill, which taught me
about ambitious, arty girls from Northumberland who went to London, became
prima ballerinas, married conductors and lived in smart flats in a St John’s
Wood mansion block with a service restaurant. The building actually exists; I’m
still waiting for the bestseller that would allow me to be able to afford to
live there amongst what I imagine to be tightly-upholstered sofas and hostess
trolleys.
    Here
is my copy of the first paperback edition of Joyce’s Ulysses , the cover
almost disconnected from the spine, and inscribed with my name: ‘Linda Sharan
Grant, February 1969’. Here are my dictionaries, my thesaurus, and here,
occupying a whole shelf, are the complete works of Dickens, every book he wrote
including the overlooked (rightly so) Barnaby Rudge and those Christmas
stories that aren’t A Christmas Carol . I did my MA on Dickens and these
paperbacks are over-scribbled with notes and underlinings. The glory of the
library for me is how many of the books are in poor physical condition. They
are books that have been read and read intensely. They are knocked about and
shopworn. I would be ashamed of a book whose spine was not broken.
    Here
are books that were birthday presents, with inscriptions in the front from dear
friends; some of those friends are no longer living, and some names I can’t
even decipher (or I have forgotten who they were) – but they have tried to form
a bond with me through the medium of a book. Here is a copy of the first
paperback edition of Tom Stoppard’s only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon ,
published in 1966, which nobody but me has ever heard of. Sir Edmund Spenser’s Faerie
Queene , the cover drizzled with spilt candlewax, an accident which took
place at university in 1974. An American first edition of Bleak House bought
for me at the end of the seventies as a breaking-up present by a man – an
apology for going back to his wife.
    First
editions of the forgotten American poet and short-story writer Delmore
Schwartz, some of which you can only buy in first editions, for they
were never reprinted. A Hogarth Press fifth edition of Virginia Woolf’s The
Years , still with its maroon and acid-yellow dustjacket designed by Vanessa
Bell. I bought it (and a number of other books) with an £8 book token, a prize
for winning a poetry competition. Many a long year lost, though, is the
paperback of The Waves which Leonard Woolf signed and