New Lockdown, Third Week, Friday
The real danger in adding my tiny number of ‘1st Editions’ to the catalogue raisonné, is not the peril of advertising stealable wealth (one of my books I checked on a 1st edition web site, and it cost three times more to send the book from the USA than the actual cost of the thing itself!) but rather the danger of the books themselves; once looked at and opened up I began reading them.
The one that I am re-reading at the moment is called ‘One’ – a dystopian novel by the American author David Karp, where the benevolent government regards individuality as heresy and tries to root it out. The central character is a lip-reading English Professor called Burden who is employed as a government informant who writes reports on the heretical things that his colleagues say and which he transcribes every evening. Burden thinks that he does a valuable and governmentally appreciated job, and his own self-worth shows that he is well on the way to the heresy of individualism himself, though of course he does not recognize it. It is however, recognized by the inquisitor character in the novel called Lark who feels an instinctive revulsion when he hears Burden and tries to claim him as someone to be ‘saved’.
The novel was published in America in 1953 and you can tell that Karp is indebted to the 1948 publication of ‘1984’ by Orwell and perhaps a memory of the Grand Inquisitor’s Tale in ‘The Brothers Karamazov’.
I think in this re-read, I am more interested in what the characters are actually saying rather than the action of the narrative: the difference in reading the novel as a piece of literary sci-fi and reading it as a discussion about the possibility of human freedom and independence in a caring society – and I feel that I should scatter a fair number of quotation marks in the last part of that sentence!
It’s just as well that I am (re)enjoying the book because as an artifact it is interesting without being valuable. It lacks its dust cover; the front cover has sun damage; the spine is a little tatty; there is a chunk out of the margin of page 11; the back cover is sun damaged; there is slight foxing on the edges; it has one of my ‘Ex libris’ stickers inside – in other words, it’s an interesting first edition, but basically worthless to a collector! But it is still, at least to me, rather remarkable that this ‘modern’ novel is just three years younger than me, and reading the original hardback is somehow more of an experience than reading the Penguin paperback edition that I also possess!
My paintings and prints are now catalogued and I am determined to find a way to display the ones that have not been looked at for some time. I remember that the National Gallery has a downstairs area where paintings are displayed floor to ceiling, the sort of thing that you can see in a painting by
Zoffany of the Uffizi in Florence. These paintings (in the National) where not displayed in the main collection, but it was thought better to put them on show in that crowded way rather than have them lurk in some depository. A good idea I think and one that I have decided to adopt on the sides of the bookcases in the ‘library’. The smaller etchings can be placed there, they can be seen and, more importantly, they can easily be moved around to gain new perspectives.
I have realized that the positions of some of the paintings have not changed since we moved into the house, and I have also realized that the glass of some of the paintings has not been cleaned for the same period of time. When the grime of years has been removed, the paintings will live again!
