WE'RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BARN:

For me, like countless others, a life without books would be a living death. Like relics, books really do work miracles for the children lucky enough to grow up surrounded by them. A home with books is a launching pad for a life well lived.

Though books may be secularised relics, book-lovers are not saints. They possess only one virtue: perseverance. The grander sort of bibliophiles don't necessarily even need that. Most book dealers and collectors would never dream of spending hours rummaging through the bookshelves of bargain basements and charity shops, village fêtes and markets, or even scouring the murkier corners of reputable establishments, from Any Amount of Books in the Charing Cross Road to the Strand Bookstore in Lower Manhattan. Even in the days before bookshops went online and bargains became rareties, they never bothered to get their hands dusty. But I did and I do. 

For me, serendipity and serenity go hand in hand; and the most satisfying objet trouvé is the book. Once found, the sought-after volume creates a kind of aura of tranquillity around itself. There are, of course, gradations of serendipity: a book that must once have given me deep satisfaction now struggles to justify its place alongside rarer or more handsome volumes. But every personal library is a bibliographical palimpsest: its earlier acquisitions are gradually obscured by later ones, until one reaches the point where antiquarianism and sentimentalism can no longer be reconciled. Choices must be made. While old lamps are almost always better than new, with books one sometimes has to choose between the dog-eared paperback, the faithful companion of one's student years, and the irresistible first edition; the latter copy is much older than the former, though much newer to me. 

One is loathe to part with old friends, of course, but nobody has infinite space. Downsizing sounds so sensible and wholesome. It is, however, the euthanasia of the book-lover. I know one writer who has filled several entire houses with his books, quite apart from the one he calls home. His long-suffering spouse has come to terms with her husband's bibliomania. Perhaps she secretly dreads him suffering the fate of Peter Kien, the protagonist of Elias Canetti's Die Blendung (translated as Auto da Fé), whose library destroys his marriage and  ultimately his life. My wife has a simpler solution: one book in, one (or preferably two) out. Thanks to their lower overheads, charity bookshops, especially Oxfam, have driven out the competition on the high street; they are, though, still welcome recyclers of secondhand literature. Unfortunately, whenever I donate a box of books, I end up by buying at least one or two. And every so often review copies arrive in the post. It may happen that one takes it to the book launch and the author signs it, whether in gratitude for a good review or perhaps exasperation, because for some writers no review is ever good enough. The book is thereby given a permanent home: nobody can decently sell or donate a copy signed to oneself, if only for fear that the author will encounter it again. My wife is wise to this ruse: she sighs when I return from a launch brandishing an inscribed copy. The only solution, she says, is a converted barn with mobile bookstacks, like those in academic libraries. Perish the thought!

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