Tsundoku: An Introduction

Let’s start with a battle cry, but quietly, just in case you are in the library.

I don’t retreat into books, I advance out of them. I go into a bookshop with one fascination and come out with five more. I always need another book. I love their potential.

I love the moment of pulling an intriguing title from a shelf and exploring what’s within, perhaps E. C. Cawte’sRitual Animal Disguise or Julian Symons’sThe 31st of February – ‘an ugly vortex of horror at the limit of human tension’. On a perfect day I walk out of the bookshop with a canvas bag of known and unknown delights and find a tearoom, where I revel in each new purchase while tucking into a piece of Victoria sponge.

This is my holy time. Here is transcendence.

I have shaken off almost all of my other addictions, but never my insatiable desire for more and more books.

Books about William Blake.

Books about climate change.

Books about spider goats.

Books about the evolution of flight.

Books about avant-garde performance artists.

Books about Princess Margaret.*

Books about satanic transport cafés.

Those just happen to be the ones that have come home with me today.

InThe Nature of Happiness Desmond Morris wrote, ‘One of my great joys is going on a book-hunt. Finding a rare book I desperately want after a long search, acquiring it and carrying it home with me, is a symbolic equivalent of a hunt for prey.’

Being both a vegetarian and clumsy with a spear, I find this form of being a noble huntsman suits me. As a male who is far down the Greek alphabet when it comes to my masculinity, my delusions of warrior status when searching for a Shirley Jackson rarity ennoble me.

I have many gazelles mounted on my bookshelves. I do not buy books for their rarity or potential profit, I buy them because I want them, although there can be an extra frisson of excitement when you find you have purchased a rare bargain.

Browsing a thirty-pence bookstall, I once saw a 1921 hardback copy ofRelativity: The Special and the General Theory – A Popular Exposition by Albert Einstein. I had a modern copy already, but I thought it would be nice to have an old edition, an artefact that enabled me to contemplate who had been in these pages before me. It was a sixth impression, so I imagined there were many copies out there and it would be worth only a couple of quid. Later I found out it could be worth more than £300. To make my thirty-pence purchase even better, inside was a ‘bookmark’, an old Methuen marketing ad forThe Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: ‘Only the man who created TARZAN, the ape-man, could have written these amazing stories.’ Book-hunting is big game.

My entire life and my career have been shaped