No, no ,no not one for the taxman and one for us! Just a day on two sets of books at the restaurant. First up is my library. The most valuable books are stored safely elsewhere but I still have well over a thousand books picked up over the years which are now being housed downstairs at the Real Man Pizza Company on Clerkenwell Road. If you have a spare afternoon and fancy a read over a coffee or just a book to digest as you digest a chocolate pizza – you now know where to go.
I cannot remember where most of them came from or how or why I picked them up. I have been left quite a few as bequests and my father is always making space and so handing over spare tomes (his latest contribution to my library being the most pompous and mind numbing book in history: A history of the Eton hunt). And I have always been a buyer of books over the years. But thumbing through the titles as I arranged them I struggle to think why I bought, or kept, some of them. I am loathe to chuck anything out but a thick volume on US corporate law pushed me too far. And what use is a Whittaker’s Almanac from 1999?
The library is eclectic. There is some total rubbish in there. Trash novel Who Gets Fluffy springs to mind and is retained precisely because it is so bad. There are learned and not widely read tomes such as Shattered Eagles by Dr TJ Winnifrith and The History of the Royal Military Canal by his father as well as a collection of (pretty poor) poetry by my father’s maternal grandfather. Needless to say all Christopher Booker’s books are there (barring The Games War which I cannot find). My late aunt left me a stack of political histories (she was a researcher on Alistair Horne’s series on Macmillan). Cricket books are well represented but, by volume, novels probably win. A good few are from the nineteenth century and early 20th century: Austen, the Bronte’s, Waugh, Greene, Maugham, Orwell, and Hardy. But there is some modern stuff in there as well Hornby, Maupin and Christie. There are a lot of Agatha Christie books – I have always been a sucker for detective novels and TV drama. There are also a lot of cookery books – it is a passion.
From my heroes at the top of the blog we have books by Mill, Rand, Booker, Orwell, Graham and Steyn. John Seymour sits at home by my bedside right now but will find his way here eventually. Three large bookcases are now full – with some shelves double stacked but still I have several boxes to lay out. I fear that another bookcase may need to be purchased for the restaurant.
The other set of books… I am settling a few invoices for RMPC as I have brought over the chequebook from Douglas. The cheese supplier needs paying.