lending books
Borrowers and lenders
Has anyone out there got my signed copy of … No, I won’t embarrass you.
As Voltaire said in the early eighteen century: What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbours, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
Brilliant. OK, so we don’t carry live coals from house to house any more, but we’re all familiar with the concept, I’m sure.
I confess I used to be rather precious about my books – taking the old axiom, neither a borrower nor a lender be, rather too far I suspect. But of late I’ve become much more blasé. Maybe it’s the influence of Amazon? Maybe it’s advancing age – you can’t take them with you. Anyway, there’s something warming about sharing a thumping good read with friends. It bonds one with like-minded book-lovers. I visit several people who don’t get out or who are terminally ill, and there’s something confirming about leaving a book with them; a sort of unsaid promise that we’ll meet again and discuss it. As indeed we do.
But of course, there’s a downside. I’ve ‘lost’ a number of treasured tomes. Initially I kept tabs on those I lent to others, but the more I gave away the slacker I became. I’ve forgotten to whom I lent them in some instances. And I’m not brazen enough to pursue them when I do remember. Forking out again for a title when I’ve read it already seems like an indulgence too far, so I simply mourn silently and try to be magnanimous about the written word being ‘the property of all’.
And very occasionally I accept books generously lent to me too. I’m currently ploughing through three volumes of a trilogy by Gerald Lund. 
I was loaned them an embarrassingly long time ago in fact, but had to do some serious psychological work to get past the sheer size as well as the off-putting covers. They measure a whopping four inches in thickness, each book just a tad too thick to accommodate comfortably on the trusty book-deckchair. I live in constant terror of creasing the pristine spine. (I’m a bit fanatical about returning books in the same condition they came to me.) But six hundred and forty pages in, I’m really into the story – no mean feat with a cast of over thirty characters and lots of summer visitors to distract my attention. Only 1,250 to go … pages I mean, not visitors!
Lund’s story is set in the time of Jesus Christ and brings the familiar stories to life, giving a different slant on what it might have felt like to see and hear amazing things without the benefit of hindsight.
So I am now both a borrower and a lender. Voltaire would be proud of the new enlightened me!