The pleasure of strolling through a bookstore has been spooned to me since I was very young. I remember the days when I could choose a book to buy before we would go on vacation to the dutch seaside. It was so thrilling to let my eyes wander through the two bookshelves that our local bookstore, basically a shop were you could buy newspapers and magazines, and decide on this vacation’s pick.
My life improved considerably when I was 16. My mother decided that it was a good age to start to live a little more responsibly, and she decided I could have a monthly allowance to spend on cloths. I decided to stretch the meaning of that term. One could buy trousers and jumpers, but one also could buy books. They covered your brain with new layers. I couldn’t care less that my jeans had holes and me and a friend of mine distinguished ourselves from our mates buy wearing the old shirts from our fathers. We would ask our mothers to take the collar off. Cool, we thought, and cheap.
This was the start of my book collection.
Buying books was one, reading them something else. My parents had the idea that one should do homework for one and a half hours every day. I thought that was insane. We struggled for years and years about this subject. These struggles ended when I started to read a lot again after I was about 114/15. My parents thought I was doing homework, while I just gulped in novel after novel. These were the days when I would time myself. I focused so much I could read 60 pages an hour. That would mean that on some days I would start and finish the same book. Everybody was happy.
I was no stranger to reading or to like to collect books in our house. My father had studied classics. When he studied in the late fifties and early sixties, he was given a bourse that could be used for buying books. Which is just what he did. By the time he married there were thousands of them. I remember myself as a little boy, being impressed by all those books. I loved to glance through them. I loved the old books with greek texts and french annotations. I couldn’t read any of it, but I must have sensed they were published beautifully. When I am talking about this I remember exactly how my new found reading hunger started. With reading all the Bond stories by Ian Fleming my dad owned in Bruna pockets. I loved the covers as much as the stories.
I’ve always spend a (too) large amount of my disposable income on buying books. Should and could have been more sensible, but was very happy with this kind of wasting money. I’ve missed being around them, my books, these past months. Like I really was unsettled by the fact that most of my books were in storage in the half year before we left on vacation.
It is terribly pleasing though, to spend some time in a house with an exquisite library. Paul, the owner of this house, must have most of his own library in his regular house in Amsterdam, but the walls are filled with shelves and shelves of books from several generations of his family. And what an erudite family it is. Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus and Thomas Mann, all in their own languages. Just being around these books lifts me up. It almost makes me feel like I’m at home. Almost.
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