A Moving Feast

Another apology for prolonged silence. This time my excuse is moving house, which has caused me to reflect on the sheer volume of my volumes - most of my luggage was books, and they took some lugging by a couple of burly blokes. The appeal of ereaders was apparent to them as to me.  A library that fits in your handbag is surely preferable to one that fills two cars and a trailer.

However, now that I've unpacked and reshelved, I have to conclude that an ereader would not do justice to what I've actually spent the last decade and more collecting. Where would I find an electronic version of my beautifully bound set of Poets of the English Language, edited by Auden, picked up at a market for a song? Or of oddities like my Dictionary of Common Fallacies, or my Book of Facts from the 1930s? Or the edition of George Herbert that I hunted for for years and finally found in Archives in Charlotte St, Brisbane, with a price tag that miraculously corresponded with the amount in my bank account - $17.95? Or the edition of John Donne from which I worked while doing my PhD, that I picked up in a charity shop in Reading for £2? These and many others are irreplaceable. Or perhaps I should say undigitisable.

Not to mention their presence in my new home - comforting, inspiring, familiar. Voluminous.