[T]here is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books. They weren’t a luxury good during that time in my life. They were a Class A addictive substance. I’d have gladly got into serious debt to read (indeed, I did). I think I read more books in those six months than I had done during five years of university education, and I’d certainly fallen deeper into the worlds conjured on the page. There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t really see the difference.”

“Reasons to Stay Alive” by Matt Haig

Time to thin out the books I can’t see I’ll ever need again. Some I liked but feel I have finshed with; some I didn’t like; some I genuinely feel I want to share. There are some treasures in the boxes in the front room, and I hope someone will enjoy reading them. Ecclesiastical history rubs shoulders with comedy books; the quirky and delightful end of nature writing sits next to the I Ching.

My thoughts the other week on the new translations of the psalms, which have ended up way back in this blog, raised all sorts of questions for me about how texts are presented. Will the new Breviary be something I buy and learn to love? And then following that, what do I treasure about books, and is the aesthetic please of turning the pages of a book itself something I wouldn’t want to surrender? What am I giving up as I surrender these books to a charity shop?

Here are two examples of text. One, very plain, has a lot of e-technology behind it, and, perhaps inescapably, overt links to the buying of books: Kindle is so designed that ownership is private, and lending a friend a book is a different thing than the owning of a book like the family Winnie the Pooh.

They both have a place, I think: the private and portable versus the aesthetic and sociable. I can read Van Nouwen on the bus and slip umpteen volumes in my pocket when approaching my stop, or I can share the heavy pages and hard cover of A A Milne with a small person heading over the crest of the day to sleep.,

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So let me finish with one more image from today: this blog being written, the Liber Usualis (gold edge, red leather cover) from this morning; the paperback (library outer) on Manon Steffan Ros’s The Blue Book of Nebo, which is my post-work read at the moment. All texts; all products of technologies – and (what made me change direction in writing this post) all texts on the fragility of things. My Book Cull is not a big thing in the History of the Book, or even in my reading history; The Blue Book of Nebo is (so far) an uncomortable meditation on how close humanity is to a sad and hard end; the Liber Usualis fell open at the Lamentation of Jeremiah, Oh how she sits alone, the city that was full of people….