Latest Readings (Clive James) p2-3
… And always, in the Market Square, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, there was Hugh’s bookstall, known to its devotees both literary and academic as one of the great bookstalls on earth.As the laid-out stock is sold off during the day, the gaps are filled with yet more books from Hugh’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of substantial hardbacks and paperbacks. Hugh doesn’t say much, but those in the know tell me that he scores all this mouthwatering stuff at car boot sales. I suppose that the original owners of the books have died off, and their families have put the books back into the economy in the simplest way possible. As I was scheduled to die off myself, even if I did not precisely know when, it was madness to start making small piles of books on Hugh’s stall that I wanted to take home. But the madness was divine. Even if I already had the book, he might have a handier edition; and often they were titles that I had once owned but lost along the way; and most often of all they were books that I had never owned before but now realized I ought to possess. Somewhere in there was an itching sense of duty. The childish urge to understand everything doesn’t necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.
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