Tuesday, Dec 19, 2023

One of the consequences of our longevity as booksellers is the opportunity to reoffer books that we have sold over the past six decades. 2023 has brought us many libraries, ranging from just a handful to 140 large boxes of books. They have mainly come from long-time customers who are moving into smaller living spaces, or from the families of those who have died; others are from book lovers changing the direction of their collecting interests.

The pleasure we gain from finding new owners for these books, regardless of their value, is immeasurable. It might be a 1950s ‘Noddy and Big-Ears’ picture and story book, an Elvis paper-doll book, or a reprint, in an evocative dust wrapper, of Jules Verne’s ‘Five Weeks in a Balloon’. It is also the excitement of unpacking a full vellum gilt bound edition, limited to one hundred copies, signed by the author, of one of the most important novels of the twentieth century – being the first U.K. edition of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’.  

In a review in The Dial, T. S. Eliot said of Ulysses: ‘I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape." He went on to assert that Joyce was not at fault if people after him did not understand it: "The next generation is responsible for its own soul; a man of genius is responsible to his peers, not to a studio full of uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs.’