Monday, April 15, 2019

A good home for books


A good home for books

What meaning lies in any library? The truth has gone with Mehlli Gobhai, one of the finest abstractionists India has produced

If you have not read Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, I should suggest you waste no time in heading to your nearest bookshop. It is a lovely book and one of the essays I read with a detached interest was on the marriage of two bibliophile’s collections of books. What does one do with duplicates? How does one measure the sentiment one attached to one’s own second-hand copy of Book X and the spouse’s much-thumbed copy of the same book? And how does one work one’s way to some unity, some harmony? Perhaps in the expanses of American apartments some duplication might be permissible but what does one do here, in a city of small flats? Some sacrifices would be necessary. And what would happen, if the marriage of the people were not to work?

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