Authors Electric

The Good the Bad and the Ugly The London Library The London Library stacks As the Beatles once crooned ‘there are places I’ll remember’ and for me, number 2 in the places I love in the world (the first being the Che Guevara Mausoleum in Santa Clara) is the London Library. This is what a library should be.  When I became a member you still had to have references to join – now they let anyone in who will pay.  It was, and still is to some degree I’m sure, like a gentleman’s club. But open not primarily to gentlemen but to bibliophiles.  It has large wooden desks, huge leather chairs, a cataloguing system which is unique, baffling and frankly inexplicable (that may have changed now as they may have digitised everything) but this in itself gave the place another charm AND meant that you had the excuse to hide in the stacks ‘browsing’ which is what I love to do. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of the Dewey Decimal system and of knowing exactly what book you are ...

Oh dear. This month has rolled around particularly quickly and I find myself with half a day to write a blog post and not much of a clue how to fill it. I suppose I should have prepared for this eventuality, but like the frivolous grasshopper rather than the industrious ant, I've spent the time hopping about on holiday (Santorini and Ireland, since you ask), filling the hours with chat, wine and light reading rather than writing and opinion-forming. These are the topics I've been mulling over so far. First, I thought I could write about the London Library: the unexpected gems one can find when browsing its shelves, the atmosphere of intense academic study (extreme reading, you might call it), the charmingly old-fashioned comments in the visitors' book deploring mobile phones and welcoming a mouse which occasionally appears in the reading room, the way one feels so satisfyingly intellectual after a visit - but I don't really have the ...