Ian Sansom - Paper - An Elegy

(But it’s OK. You are not alone. Here’s where I’m at: I am wearing a pair of dirty, brown, broken slip-on boots that my sister bought for me about ten years ago; in both boots the sole is split right across the middle, and I have attempted to fix them with super-glue. I have two other pairs of shoes, but they too are broken, too broken in fact for me to be able to patch up, and they have therefore required professional attention and are currently awaiting collection from the excellent boot and shoe repair shop – motto, ‘Shoes Good Enough To Wear Are Good Enough To Mend’ – just off Botanic Avenue in Belfast. I am wearing one of the shirts that the father of a friend of mine kindly sent me a few years ago, when he’d retired and was throwing out all his old work clothes and buying leisurewear. All of the shirts are made of a drip-dry nylon – Alagon – of a kind now unavailable for reasons not at all clear to me; you get used to the rashes after a while, and the benefit of not having to iron the shirts surely outweighs any slight skin complaint the material may cause. My trousers are one of the two wearable pairs that I’m currently running, and they’re in pretty good condition, although they are covered in green paint from a couple of summers ago when I was painting the shed where I work in the garden. My jacket is circa 1990. And I am standing in the War on Want bookshop, down at the other end of Botanic Avenue, ostensibly on my way home from work, and I have half a dozen books in my arms, and I know that if I blow all of my £20 spending money on these books I won’t be able to get my shoes back from the cobbler, and I’ll have to leave them there another week. They’ve already been in for a month, and the proprietor of the shop has started leaving messages for me on my answerphone. I have a decision to make. I buy the books. For the foreseeable future I shall continue to be dressing like a vaudeville comedian, or a character in a play by Samuel Beckett.)

The first documented use of the word bibliomania, according to my OED – the twenty-volume second edition, bought as a present to myself when I received the advance on my first novel, and which cost me the advance on my first novel, which meant effectively that I wrote a book to buy a book – was in 1734, in the Diary of Thomas Hearne

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