Good homes wanted

Last weekend I was clearing bedrooms and studies for the pitiless attention of builders, reminding myself of the years when I could never pass a junkshop without coming out with a set of the  1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica or the complete Mark Twain, recalling how in the 1990s libraries went suddenly out of fashion and the result that so many good books were suddenly in search of a good home. 

I now have only three sets of the great 1911 encyclopaedia, having found a grateful new owner for one fine sequence in green cloth. I have walls of brown Oxford Classical texts which are convenient for browsing only the obscurest texts unavailable elsewhere. But at least they were all saved from the junkyard - and, along with Twains and Pepys and Kiplings and Anglo Saxon Chronicles, will be saved again despite the more practical use that could be put to the space.

Hence the horror just now when our esteemed colleague, Catharine Morris, revealed the shame of her Sunday shopping trip near East London's Columbia Road flower market. While I was beside the Berkshire Thames packing past follies, she was downstream finding new ones. In Ezra Street (Sundays only) the history of the TLS is for sale - amid chintz and china company which we surely never deserved. Some ingrate insitution has cast out our ancestors' labours, their noble reports on Books in Basutoland and Eastern Romanity, among crockery and worse.

But now the builders are upon me. Will no one else give these friendly volumes a good home?

   

Comments

[David Martin]

To economise on space and maintenance costs, academic libraries much prefer to discard journals and rely on 'electronic resources'. Efforts in my own institution to resist this policy - mainly on the grounds that computers can fail - were largely unsuccessful. Several years ago a complete run of the TLS would have sold for a few thousand pounds; next Sunday a vistor to Ezra Street might be welcome to carry away half a dozen volumes for a tenner.

But I'm not entirely against change, and this 'Good homes wanted' post provides an excuse to ask just how far away is 'the near future' of the new TLS website. The promise of it has appeared since at least the new year.