Dictators are
frightened by books. The fourteenth century Dominican Friar, Girolamo
Savonarola thought that books were objects of such temptation to the God
fearing folk of Florence that they needed to be burnt. Joseph Goebbels,
Hitler's Propaganda Minister, thought that books, particularly those written by
Jewish authors like Albert Einstein, were 'evil spirits of the past' and a
danger to the Nazi's New Order. On the
night of 10 May, 1933 he organised the burning of some 25,000 books in Berlin's
grand Opera Square. It was to be a tragic confirmation of Heinrich Heine's
comment of a century before that 'wherever books are burned people will end up
being burned too'. Books that are feared so much by the wicked must have
something special about them.
In fact, great
and wondrous things can happen around books. Boswell met Johnson at Tom Davies’s
bookshop in Covent Garden. Karl Marx planned to remodel the world in the
Reading Room of the British Museum. Jorge Luis Borges conceived a universe in
the form of a vast library. And as a child I spent my Sunday mornings in the
Battersea Reference Library awaiting my mother’s Sunday roast.
This little work
is a wander through some of the books that have at one time or another adorned
my little library. Necessarily, they deal with those topics that have
interested or moved me. I have some acquaintance with the law (which is the
subject of one chapter), but beyond that you must take my thoughts for what
they are worth.
