New Hobby

I’m going to start collecting old books.

Of course it sounds very cool to say – you imagine a large air-conditioned room filled with glass cases bearing a first-edition Gutenberg Bible, the very same copy of Romeo and Juliet that Shakespeare used to learn his lines, and possibly the lost plays of Sophocles.

Right. What I’m likely to end up with, if I am extremely lucky, is a couple of worm-eaten first editions from the nineteen twenties and a scrap of paper that looks aged enough for me to claim that it once belonged to Keats.

But how, when you get right down to it, do you start? Going to Crossword and asking the salesperson for an original copy of the First Folio is clearly a bad idea (especially if, as is no doubt the case, some enterprising person in this latter day has written a novel entitled First Folio about how reading the twenty-third line of each play in reverse chronological order will prove that the Dark Lady of the Sonnets was really Cleopatra in disguise).

The ideal – and Calvin-esque – way to begin, naturally, would be to print TIME MACHINE on the side of a large cardboard box, sit inside it, mutter strangely, and emerge an hour later with Cardenio under your arm.

Unfortunately that only works in comic strips.

I could go to Christie’s or Sotheby’s and buy whatever was coming up for auction. I could also have myself declared Empress of the Universe, and appropriate all old books everywhere on earth in the name of intergalactic peace or defending ourselves against the Bonga-Bongas planning to attack from Dimension X or something.

Yup. I think that would be best.