Books I

To Presteigne yesterday in an afternoon of fitful rain and cool sunshine. The town was faintly, unusually subdued, as if waiting for another shower of heavy rain. I found some fragments of seventeenth-century Dutch tiles in Tony's antique shop; they are by far the oldest things I own. writing recently about Liverpool I wrestled with ideas about hoarding versus free travel - an argument I have had with myself many times and with others. Do we hoard books, music and beautiful objects or do we travel light and fast? And on a more abstract note, what are the things we hoard? Ideas and old feelings or memories can hold you back more than any number of books. Anyway...

I am a hoarder and will always buy new/old books. Rarely new/new ones. Books are the oldest things I own. I have a small number of treasured items that belonged to my grandparents, but nothing older than a century. I have a large number of nineteenth-century books - mainly poetry and history - and a smaller number of eighteenth-century ones - mainly 1730s religious works and the Gentleman's Magazine, collated and bound in the late 1770s - but before the American Revolution - which I found in the rain outside Atticus in about 1980. It cost me 10p. I also have one or two very old books which could date from the 1690s; I am not sure. Again, these are religious books and the proceedings of the Athenian Society. These old books are usually a bit battered and are not worth anything; I collected them because I pitied their age and vulnerability. Their sense of history; an odd volume of Tacitus from 1811, a loose volume of Goethe in Gothic German dating from 1816, a comparison between Aristotle and Plato in Greek and Latin dating from 1803. Who else was going to buy that? Hang the expense, another 50p to Tony's Antiques.

So the fragments of seventeenth-century tile are older than my oldest book, by at least 20 years or so. Shaky hand-painting, a glaze pitted by air bubbles. I will try and upload images when the light is better suited to my camera and ability; I manage to take a photo of the back, which resembles the corner of an unrestored fresco or a contour map.