I've lost a lot of books over the years. Here's one's that I miss:
Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square: I was sure I had a copy, but when I wanted to lend it to a friend, could not locate it anywhere. May turn up when I move house and/or catalogue my collection.
Lots lost when my parents moved house after my father retired from practice as a GP. They lived in a big house, quite central in Cambridge, on Lensfield Road by the corner with Tennis Court Road. While we needed a big house the space to accommodate a consulting room, a waiting room and even a dispensary as well as the normal rooms for a family of four, when he gave up the practice there was no case for staying there, my brother and I having moved away. Much furniture was sold, including the roll-top desk I had had in my study, and my father also sold some of his surgery equipment to a doctor based somewhere in North London, Edmonton I think. As I was living in Golders Green at the time, it was suggested that the same doctor should bring down the books to his surgery, whence I should collect them. Of course a mixture of the practical difficulties involved and general laziness on my part meant that this never happened and I left it so long that I did not dare contact the doctor to collect them. I hope they went to a good home. Among them were:
John Donne's complete poems, in the Oxford edition. This I won as the Old Persean Society Essay Prize at school, for an essay on Marxism and religion (I argued for the first and against the second).
John Dos Passos's USA: fantastic book, must replace
James Joyce's Ulysses: the Penguin edition, bought when I was 14 from a branch of Heffers on the corner of Trumpington Street and Pembroke Street, where I spent much of my time and money as a teenager. I read and re-read Ulysses all the time. I did not find it at all inaccessible, though I later borrowed Finnegan's Wake from the then-excellent Cambridge public library and was defeated. Cambridge public library was in those days in the Guildhall, the entrance more or less opposite the Corn Exchange and the Guild café where I and school fellows would gather to drink revolting coffee.
An account of May 68 in Paris by two Observer journalists which was published as a Penguin. This was politically formative: apart from their account of the bewildering number of groupuscules involved, their description of the Comités d'Action Lycéeen was very influential on me and others who set up Cambridge Schools Action Union and later on the Cambridge branch of the National Union of School Students. I still have some copies of our journal which we edited in a basement of the Cambridge Students Union offices by the Round Church (not to be confused with the nearby Union Society, a talking-shop for would-be MPs). The journal was called Hedghog, a title devised to indicate that we were small but prickly. The President of CSU in those days, who was very helpful to us, was one Charles Clarke who later went on to greater things
I shall list more lost books as I remember them.
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