Old but still good

At a car boot sale a lovely smiley man was selling boxes of old books.  I looked through one of them and said without thinking "You know, some of these could be quite valuable."
"I'll tell you what, love"  he said. "They were my old mum's. I'm not selling them for the money.  I want them to go to someone who really wants them".  Then he looked firmly at me. " A fiver a box, love.  A whole box or nothing."
There was every sort of reading matter in there; instructions for old washing machines and Hoovers, a pamphlet on how to service an ancient-looking boiler, an inky-looking advertisement for a sale-of-work in a country school in October 1965. Underneath was the book which had drawn my attention first, a lovely copy of "Rambles in Eirinn" by William Bulfin, published by M.H. Gill of Dublin in 1908, together with a set of history books, in not such good condition:  "History Of Ireland From The Earliest Times To The Present Day", by The Rev. E.A.D'Alton, LL.d. M.R.I.A. The publishers were the Gresham Publishing Company, London and the date in Roman numerals 1912. The six volumes were described as Half-Volumes 1,2,3,4,5,and 6, a term I have never come across before.  At one time they must have been very handsome, with their green cloth covers with green lettering on a gold base and gold illumination. One had a damaged spine, and they bore the resigned air of books which had lain in an attic for many years.  However, they had been well used and loved - there were
very lightly pencilled notes in many of the margins, and here and there a pressed autumnal leaf marked a page. Looking through them again today, if the first chapter of the very first volume, entitled "Various Names of Ireland" is anything to go by, these books  are  unputdownable, although if I manage to get even part of the way through the 284 pages of the initial one, I will be doing well, for I have come across so many books I want to read since I started this blog that I would need another ninety years of life to have any hope of doing so.

In the box also, quite incongruously, were two fairly modern paperback editions of James Bond books, "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "Live and Let Die".
I handed over the money, and in the course of a short conversation I discovered that his mother was dead two years, and he had only now started to sort out her things.  She had been almost ninety when she died.  I had to ask if she was a James Bond fan.  He laughed.
 - "She were a bit of a James Bond herself".  I was interested, but he turned away to talk to someone else and then went to root in his van.  I sensed the conversation was over.

Old books are so much about the people who owned them - where and why they bought them or who gave them to them, what they meant in their lives; fiction or non-fiction, books draw other stories in their wake as long as they exist.

In the first paragraphs of his book about his cycling tour around Ireland, Bulfin tells us -
"It was the last day of June, and the weather was perfect. The people along the road said it was "shocking warm" and "terrible hot, glory be to God", but after seventeen sweltering years at the sunny South I found it just charming.......it was a splendid dawn.  We seemed to have brought with us some of the sunshine of the South, for earth and sea and air were flooded with morning gold. It flamed in the soft clouds which dotted the sky.  It flushed the blue.  It lay on the hills.  It rippled on the water."  and so on, in warm words which mitigate a little the grey blue of the winter afternoon outside my window.  The book has many photographs of Irish locations, worthy of a visit for reasons of scenery or history or archaeology.  The photos particularly fascinate because of the changes in the depicted places since they were taken; the traffic in the Dublin and Cork of this book would not have offered the same threat to Bulfin that modern vehicles do to a cyclist.  How free it must have felt to travel the country's roads without fear of the monsters which now loom around every corner.

The front cover of Bulfin's work is quite undamaged, the title and author's name illuminated in gold and decorated likewise.  The smooth, cream-coloured pages bear some inconsequential marks but in general they are sound.

The technological and scientific advances we have seen today, unthinkable only a few years ago, make me speculate that there may well come a time when it will be possible to identify the people who once opened this book, maybe all books that survive. We have already overtaken James Bond and goodness knows where it will end.

 Such, I suppose, are the thoughts of many like myself who read their books and dream.