BOOK BORROWING

Evening Star, Issue 21820, 8 September 1934, Page 2

BOOK BORROWING

[Written by Panache, for the ‘ Evening Star.’]

A new bookcase is a satisfactory present to make to oneself when the old ones are overflowing. My new one i« unobtrusive and attractively proportioned, in height what husbands used to like their wives to be—just as high as the heart. The shelves are not cavernous, but, nicely graded, so that pocket volumes do not disappear from sight, and Shakespeare and the dictionaries need not slop over on their sides nor lie prostrate with their weight. The shelves are so bright and tidy that they resemble a garden. The poets’ .shelf is rightly the most gorgeous, the blues and purples and scarlets recalling the hangings in Solomon’s temple. The little green volumes are so'newly straightened and tidied that they look like a promising row of young cabbages newly hoed up. The fiction is the flower garden, particularly, the Phoenix volumes in their red and white jackets—those colours the Brontes loved. Some of the Everyman 'dust jackets must come off; they are gaudy and a little tattered, like scarecrows, but not sufficiently like scarecrows to frighten off prospective borrowers. Already in the green uniform row of Virginia Woolf there is a gap, noticeable as an'empty seat in the front row of the circle usually occupied by someone distinguished who rarely misses a performance, the gap where ‘Mrs Dalloway ’ belongs. The lower classes borrow the necessities of life. The messenger says that Mum would be obliged for the lend of a couple of eggs till Friday, or till Dad is paid. A little higher up those who are assured of bare necessities borrow seasonable goods, such as preserving pans, or emergency devices like mouse traps. The aristocracy borrow casually thousands of pounds or luxury yachts; but the borrowing of books seems to be the peculiar habit of the middleclasses.

Occasionally a neighbour will ask for the loan of a lawn mower, but he always returns it promptly; whereas if he put it away in his washhouse for a few weeks I should gratefully think of him as a benefactor, and his negligence as a blessed dispensation from grass-cutting. Books are the only treasured possessions that are lent freely. Nobody ever says: “ You might lend me your Venus and your Laughing Fawn for a few weeks; I’ve nothing to look at these days,” and sends them back chipped. Nobody is ever asked to take down an etching from his walls that it may adorn for a month a friend’s drawing x-oom. The patch of unsunburned paper would proclaim the loss too loudly. Gramophones are sometimes borrowed, but with full consciousness of the privilege and with frequent acknowledgments of the benefit conferred. The unselfish lender of books is not esteemed at his true worth. He falls in love with a library book, reads it with such delight that he orders a copy, and on the very day he puts it triumphantly on his shelves against the hour when he can enjoy a quiet gloat, the sharp-eyed borrower spots its newness and asks for the loan of it. Reluctantly the . owner admits that he has read it, and passes the new treasure over to a stranger, from whbsc careless hand it will take its first caress. The borrower, adding insult to injury, sniffs in a superior way when he finds uncut pages, and stigmatises the generous owner as a superficial skipper. Then the he-borrower tears the uncut pages with his stubby forefinger, and the sheborrower with a crinkly hairpin. 'So when our book comes home again and we recognise it from afar, we find it is a very prodigal. There are some borrowers, ignorant of metaphor, who take' literally Bacon’s celebrated advice: “ Some books are to be tasted.” Who has not seen marks like those of a sticky tongue, especially on boards of light blue? “Some few are to be chewed.” This happens only occasionally, and to corners of books in those homes where children are not repressed. The process of chewing is stopped before digestion begins, but there is always tho feeling that it is the child who is saved from the book, not the book from the child.

■ One result Of lending books is that people are restrained from marking their favourite passages, for nnderliuings and crosses tell too much, while annotations made in good faith to oneself may, either terrify friends by their erudition or appal them by their ignorance. People may refrain from marking their own books either from shyness or from the instinct of self-preservation ; but those who belong to circulating libraries may indulge in anonymous orgies. The pencil of the pedant gets busy over split infinitives; applause is shown by “Hear, hear”; disgust by a marginal “Nonsense!” Fortunately there are irritated scavengers with erasers lying in wait for these officious exhibitionists.

0 The friend who belongs to a library with pleasure to a private bookcase, exclaiming how new and clean the books are. He takes home two or three, secure from any fear of fires. In the third week the strong-minded lender rings up the borrower, but it is not easy to be strong-minded without being misunderstood. The methodical mark down the the transaction in a little book, but this is cold-blooded and demands an office training. The anxious insert in the volume a bookmark with a verse of doggerel in which " lend ” and “ friend ” close a couplet of plaintive hope and admonition. Carolyn Wells has made a verse that is sturdy as well as plaintive:—

They borrow hooks they will not buy, They have no ethics or religions; I wish some kind Burbankiah guy Could cross my books with homing pigeons.

But to inscribe such lines inside, say, the lively coloured board of 1 Heloise and Abelard ’ would estrange George Moore and his reader for ever; while nice old Burbank in his plum-coloured gown would, with his cross-fertilisation,

cause a flutter in many a quiet dovecote. Something simpler is required. If books, like badly-brought-up children, would only scream when they wanted to go home. Better still, if, like Mandrakes, they would shriek hideously when uprooted from their shelves,