Chaos Outside, Order Inside
In my one and only race for public office — hardly a cutthroat competition since I ran unopposed — I was elected student fiction-buyer for the Haldane Library at Imperial College, London, during my second year studying for a Bachelor’s degree in biology. The Haldane Library was named for the now-little-known Richard Burdon Haldane (Viscount Haldane of Cloan, 1856–1928), a “philosopher-politician” who served twice as British Lord Chancellor, once as a member of the Liberal Party during World War I and the second time in 1924, in Britain’s first Labour government.
I loved my fiction-buying post. I pored over publishers’ catalogues, choosing my favorite authors. I liked to wander along the shelves, noting that thanks to me — Me! — the library now owned a copy of this or that exciting new novel. I can still remember the calm I felt in contemplating the shelves, a calm that I still feel in contemplating my own bookshelves, the library I have been building for decades, shipping books from place to place as I’ve moved countries three times: From England to Israel to the US and back to Israel.
Our own library is now impressive, and it occupies every room in our house, including the staircase. We have novels and poetry, children’s books, feminism, science, thrillers, history of everything and everywhere, books of Jewish liturgy and learning, dictionaries and encyclopedias, art books, travel books, coffee table books, cookbooks, out-of-print books about insects, rare books discovered on street stalls, obscure works eased from the dusty racks of secondhand bookstores, and the Complete Works of Shakespeare, a prize awarded for “good conduct” to my grandfather David Harris in June 1913 by the Jews’ Free School in London.
As the chaos of the world increases, especially in the past year of the coronavirus pandemic, I find myself impelled to rearrange the shelves repeatedly.
From the outside, this may seem a little odd. We have endured three lockdowns in Israel — the latest ongoing — three bouts of home-schooling, strict rules that limit our movements, a prime minister indicted for breach of trust, accepting bribes, and fraud, my own existential terror about climate change, and fears about contracting Covid_19. Yet time and again I turn to my shelves, seeking serenity in the solidity of books, their colorful spines, the source of quiet pleasure and wisdom. It seems that when chaos reigns in the larger world outside, stability endures in the form of dictionaries, novels, the complete works of Charles Darwin, or a tiny, paperback commentary on the Biblical book of Jonah.
When I graduated from Imperial College, I went on to do a Master’s Degree in Information Science at the City University in London. Perhaps I thought that I could translate my love of libraries into a career, not realizing that I was about to embark on what turned out to be one of the most boring years of my life. But I did emerge with a Master’s thesis on the impact of “electronic mail” on information services (which I later turned into my one and only published scientific paper) as well as a working knowledge of the Dewey Decimal system, which could explain for my passion for classifying books.
Not that I adhere to the Dewey Decimal System when I rearrange my books. My system is more eccentric. For example, Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain’s shattering World War I memoir, is placed next to Winifred Holtby’s novel “South Riding,” because Brittain and Holtby were friends, both of them committed feminists, pacifists and socialists who lived together and critiqued each other’s writings. I have a small section for “books written by friends” even if on disparate topics. My food section includes a fragile paperback called Some Heads Have Stomachs, published in 1964 by Jean-Louis Edmond Brindamour II, who set out to collect recipes from Heads of States around the world. (“I do not particularly want my gustatory tastes to be broadcast to the world,” wrote the governor of Bermuda, Major General Sir Julian Gascoigne, in 1960. “I feel that might never be given any other dish.”)
One benefit of owning a large book collection — and knowing exactly where to find each title — is that I’ve been able to turn my own bibliothèque into a private lending library during lockdowns, when local libraries and bookstores are closed. I’ve handed over bags of books to friends who are seeking a respite from boredom, especially when quarantined at home with small children. It gives me great satisfaction to recommend books that I think my friends will enjoy, and then discuss the book, whether or not they liked it. So it seems that, decades after my reign as student fiction-buyer at Imperial College, I’ve turned full circle and become my own librarian. Just one of the tiny, and unexpected, boons of being confined at home during a coronavirus pandemic.
