There used to be a second-hand bookshop in Ludlow, but there is no longer. It was there that, a number of years before, I had bought the shocking-pink-covered refutation of Gibbon’s famous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, the chapters in which he explained the rise of Christianity not by the workings of divine providence, but by operation of secular causes—not all of them flattering to the religious point of view. Second-hand bookshops can barely survive, however, in fashionable towns such as Ludlow. The rents are too high, and the general public, which has an infinite appetite for ornaments, alternative medicine and health- food products, has none at all for musty old books.
Nonetheless, there still is an antiquarian bookseller in Ludlow. By coincidence I had bought a book from him through the internet shortly before, and the friends whom we were visiting were friends of his. I had never met him and, Ludlow being small, he was but a short walk away. His business was entirely online, but he welcomed visitors such as I, whose main discretionary expenditure was on books.
He lived in a beautiful eighteenth-century house, wonderfully furnished. We discussed briefly the state of the trade—very bad and getting worse. The problem was that the last generation to be interested in old books was thinning out and was not being replaced by young people from a generation increasingly obsessed by electronic gadgetry and who regarded a page on a screen as a long text. Like Talleyrand before the French Revolution, we felt that no one who had not known the pleasures of the browse through antiquarian book shelves had known the full sweetness of life. Though I did not like to interrupt our nostalgia, the strange thing was that the price of old books was not falling. If fewer people were interested in them, surely their price should fall? This paradox, he pinned to the fact that the older book-loving generation may have reduced in size, but its economic power had increased compared to the young.
We went down into his capacious cellar where his books were ranged. He showed me a first edition in English, in pristine condition, of Newton’sPrincipia, with the titleThe Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, a marvellous book for those alive not only to its content (the greatest intellectual advance, said Einstein, that it has ever been given to one man to make) but to the physical beauty of early eighteenth century scientific illustration and diagrams. I hardly dared hold it for, not having been raised in the midst of precious objects, I have a habit of dropping or otherwise damaging the most valuable things out of sheer nervousness; besides which I did not want to give the impression that I might possibly buy such a book.
Left alone among the shelves, I was as happy as a bookworm. I can spend hours reading the first paragraphs of a thousand books, no matter how recondite their subject matter. I even relish books with titles such asA Brief History of Banking in Plaistow orThe Influence of Calvinism on Trade Unionism in Aberdeen. The real bookworm,trogiumpulsatorium, must be under evolutionary threat, for its once ubiquitous habitat—mouldy, dark, dusty, dank, and neglected shelves, filled with old books whose paper has not been treated chemically has all but disappeared. When I find an old book with the neat little holes sometimes running through hundreds of pages made by bookworms—pinholed, as the booksellers say—I am filled with admiration for nature’s infinite devices.
Among the cheaper volumes was a biography of Stephen Hales, D.D., F.R.S., by A.E. Clark-K
