John Walsh: Tales of the City

Amid the kerfuffle about which books children should read by the time they leave school (Andrew Motion suggested Ulysses, Paradise Lost, Don Quixote and Portrait of a Lady, which is like proposing that teenagers should be expected to sit through Bach's B minor Mass, Beethoven's late Quartets and the whole Ring Cycle) and the ensuing revelations about the value of reading (one Times columnist admitted, or rather boasted, that she'd read absolutely no books at all since she left university), nobody asked a crucial question: Whatever happened to the library?

I don't mean the ancient municipal building just off the High Street, where you borrow books and get fined. I mean a personal library, in which the books you've read and finished rub shoulders harmoniously with the books you bought because you thought you should read them sometime and think your life will seem better if you have Rousseau's Confessions or The Mabinogion on your shelves.

Mr Motion comes from a tradition of people whose private library was an index of the person they were - learned, discriminating, subtle, wide-ranging in interests - and whose contents were the paper equivalent of a good wine cellar, with all that implies about vintages that need laying down for years until they're ready to be drunk and you're equipped to savour them.

When I embarked, at 15, on an epic reading list (I suddenly realised that all I'd read in months was a novelisation of a Man from U.N.C.L.E. film), it started a passion for collecting cheap second-hand paperbacks in tiny, mouse-scented bookshops all over Britain. Driven by no guiding principle, I bought armfuls of thick Russian and French classics, sacks of English antiquities I'd never open (Roderick Random, The Master of Ballantrae) and stacks of works by forgotten talents but fancy names, like W Harrison Ainsworth. Once you start collecting books, a madness grips your soul. You have to possess every novel that Trollope or Balzac ever wrote. You find you're buying Goethe's Elective Affinities in high Germanic script, that you couldn't read even if you wanted to.

Cultural cringe

My library grew like a leylandii bush - and then the first disobliging visitor asked, "All these books - you read 'em all?" If you replied truthfully that, well no, not all of them, obviously, but that you looked forward to doing so one day, you received a sneer that told you `you were a self-deluding poseur. That was in the 1970s. Until a few years ago, I assumed that nobody except bona fide men of letters, or literary hacks like me, bothered to construct a proper library of books-to-be-read any more. Then I heard that Keith Richards of the Stones had broken his arm while falling from a pair of mobile steps in the library at his Redlands mansion. A proper library with mobile steps? What could be more deliciously antiquarian? Way to go, Keith. I asked him what had caused his fall. "I was reaching for a volume of Michelangelo drawings and overdid it," he said. "That Michelangelo, man - he's a hard teacher." Instantly, the library had cachet, it had balls, it had a skull ring. It was something to aspire to again.

Keith was not the only library casualty in literary history: at the end of Howards End, the hapless self-improving clerk Leonard Bast is crushed by a falling bookcase, a symbolic punishment for his uppity attempt to invade the territory of his betters. The rest of us, who with luck will get through life without suffering shelf-related fatalities, can raise a glass today to the Everyman Library, which celebrates its centenary next week.

A great enterprise

It was on 15 February 1906 that Joseph Dent, the son of a Darlington house-painter, kicked off the enterprise by publishing 50 titles, beautifully bound and dirt cheap. He wasn't well-educated (he left school at 13) but he knew the world's classics, and the aspirations of his audience, well enough to realise he'd make a fortune by bringing them together. And he made a ringing claim for the role of the library in your life: "For a few shillings, the reader may have a whole bookshelf of the immortals; for five pounds (which will procure him a hundred volumes) a man may be intellectually rich for life."

The Everyman books, with their green spines and title-pages fussily crammed with fruit-and-flower designs from the William Morris school, were the only hardbacks I could afford when I was on my buying spree. (You could buy your Wuthering Heights and Tender is the Night in Penguin paperback - but, dammit, you were trying to build a library here.) My first exposure to Bleak House and Crime and Punishment was via Everyman books, and for a time I associated their design with glum and imprisoned things.

As an induction to serious literature, this did no harm. In a way that no jaunty paperback could, it made you feel slightly awed, as if you were approaching some holy place and should damn well remove your hat and show some respect.

The Library went into a decline for some years, unable to compete with the might of Penguin, but rallied in 1991 with the arrival of David Campbell, the genial and energetic publisher who came up with the rust-and-cream livery we all know. Everyman has risen above the cheap slight that people buy its Collected Dickens by the yard as wedding presents for their haut-bourgeois, non-reading friends. Its core 300 titles represent the heart of Western literature, a platoon of living and dead writers no other publisher can match. Into their ranks they're about to introduce The Diary of John Evelyn, Casanova's History of My Life and the great Alice Munro's Collected Stories. It's the literary equivalent of canonisation. For a century the Everyman Library has kept the literary A-list at the forefront of the world's regard. They make a case for the private library as a one-room emblem of civilisation, no less. Provided, of course, you steer clear of the mobile stepladders.

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