The Roar of the Recycling Centre

I don't know if you've ever seen what happens to books at the recycling centre, and of course no doubt they are not all the same.  At my local recycling centre, the first thing you are aware of is the noise; the roar of forklift trucks, shouting, talking, banging noises.  Certainly not like any library you've ever visited, I may suppose.  Against one wall is a row of book shelves, with people unloading their unwanted books from bags and boxes.  A few people browse along the shelves, some taking one or two away  I see a child enthusing to his father about some children's books.  "You know your mother would kill me if you brought one of those home!, says the parent.  They walk away, the child walking backwards and wearing a mournful, disappointed expression.

Periodically, a young man decants armloads of books from the shelves and dumps them unceremoniously into a tall wire basket.  As this fills, other baskets appear.  Then with a roar a forklift arrives and carries away the filled basket.  As more books arrive into the new baskets, a worker in a hi-viz vest stirs the contents around and around.  When I stoop to look he sighs heavily and moves to another basket which he proceeds to agitate in the same, albeit unintentionally diabolic manner.  I root and examine and seize and rescue - he is back and waits with heavy patience until I move away. I consider his job one of the most horrific in the world.  It makes me think of the burning of books in China during the era of Chairman Mao, or the bonfires of the Nazi era in Germany.  But of course this is for environmental reasons.  Still, it's horrible.  In the back of the large recycling warehouse there are cages and cages and cages stacked high with books which will never see the light of day again.  All that print, all that waste...there are people all over the world who do not own one book, who cannot afford to buy even one book, who have nowhere to keep a book, let alone themselves.  A worker at the centre told me that it was not economically viable to send these books abroad.

Now I will tell you about some of the books I liberated from the recycling centre. First off, a slender book in cardboard covers, "The Use of Vegetable Dyes" by Violetta Thurstan, published by the Dryad Press, Leicester.  my copy being its eighth edition, dated 1964.  It is a book full of recipes for making your own dyes from plants of all sorts, including lichens and mosses.  It goes thoroughly into the methods and the plants, but it is only a wee slip of a book, numbering 46 pages and the index.  Did you know that you can make a bluish dye from whortleberry (Vaccinium myrtillus), a yellow from wild mignonette (Reseda luteola) and a black dye from the roots of meadow sweet (Spirea ulmaria)?  The latter was used in the Highlands of Scotland for dyeing the tartans.  It is a little treasure of a book..

I also rescued "Down the Garden Path" by Beverley Nichols.  I remember Beverley had a column in either Woman or Woman's Own, a magazine I used to sneak looks at when my mother was elsewhere, as she considered it not suitable for children...oh, those long-ago innocent times. If she could see the magazines children have access to nowadays... It appears that this volume had actually been a local library book, probably sold off at one of their sales, (one hopes not purloined or just not returned), so it had had a tortuous career path.  The interesting thing is that I had read it before in a tattered copy bought at a school sale which someone 'borrowed' from me and did forget to return.  The copy from the recycling centre is, except for those awful library stamps, in perfect condition.  It was first published in in 1932, and went through twenty impressions until it appeared in my copy, reissued by Florin Books in 1938, Florin being an imprint, it seems, of Jonathan Cape of London and Toronto.  It was first received into the library, the stamp informs, in 1981.  Where it was up to that date, i.e. for 43 years, is a mystery.

It is at times one of the funniest books I have ever read.  Beverley Nichols was a hugely popular writer, and he had his own sometimes quite vicious style.  He tells us in a note before the book begins that some parts of the work appeared in Country Life magazine.  The book describes his first efforts at gardening, but it is the characters who come into it who make it funny -

"I will call my next garden acquaintance Undine Wilkins, because is the sort of bastard name she ought to have had....Because she is very thick-skinned, she will not recognize herself, and I should not greatly care if she did, for she is rich, thoroughly self-satisfied, and now lives in the Colonies." then later   "......she pushed her rather large and thickly powdered nose into a bush of honeysuckle, murmured 'divine jasmine',........she was always posing in ultra-old-world positions all over the garden. While one was squashing beetles or pulling up weeds she would drape herself against a tree or a bush, fondly imagining that she thereby enhanced its beauty..."

Well, it is an old book, so I supppose we'll have to overlook the bit about squashing beetles.

"...She had, for example, a huge hat with ribbons, which she swung girlishly over one arm.
'This is for making hay,' she giggled.
'It looks as if it were made of hay already'.
'Oh let's..let's make hay...now! Lots of it'
I would very much have liked, at that moment, to take her by the neck and rub her nose in an ants' nest. Instead, like a perfect gentleman, I said 'Hay isn't made till July'. Then I added hastily, 'At least, I think it is. At any rate it isn't made in June'
'Oh, but let's make it earlier...and sell it...and make lots and lots of money!'

And then there is Mrs. M.  "She is damnably efficient.  She spends next to nothing on her garden, and gets astonishing results.  She shows you a blaze of delphiniums. 'All out of a penny packet,' she croons. You pass a bank flaming with golden broom. 'All from seed,', she declares. 'A shilling packet I bought years ago'.There is a lot more of Mrs. M., and if you want to see it, I recommend the book.

The BBC Woman's Hour Book , compiled by the Editors, Joanna Scott-Moncrieff and Madge Hart and published by arrangement with the BBC by The World's Work (1913) Ltd. of Kingswood, Surrey in 1957 is a compendium of different essays which were obviously read on the radio.  I have read a great article in it on bloodhounds from which I learned that the breed almost disappeared after the second world war, that bloodhounds will check and examine and turn over several times meat given to them even by their owner, before even considering consuming it, and that their ability to follow a scent has never been surpassed by any other breed.  This was a piece by a lady known as Viscountess Waverley of whom I know nothing, but the book is full of wonderful writing, from 'Starting a Tea-Shop' by one Philip McCutchan to a sad and funny tale of unrequited love, 'The Doom of Being a Clown in Love' by Pamela Frankau.  Why is that name familiar!  The pieces are so short that they could be read while waiting, for the kettle to boil, or the TV ads to finish, or something in the oven to bake.

I wanted to tell you about more of these 'rescues' but time is running out.  But I must tell you about 'A Guide to the Languages of Europe - A Practical Phrase-Book'  by Archibald Lyall, published in London by Sudgwick & Jackson, Ltd.from 1932 until my own copy dated 1948.
I must confess that I have a 'thing' about languages, and I couldn't believe my eyes, I was so pleased when I reached in and retrieved this book from one of the baskets.  The languages are French, Italian, Spanish, Portguese, Romanian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian....I had better stop before you flee...but entrancingly Albanian, Arabic and Esperanto are included in the languages dealt with, 26 in all.   Lyall deals with the pronunciation, and gives some useful phrases and a handy dictionary for each language.  I am the possessor of some multi-language electronic dictionaries,  but I still love this book.

I end by recounting what a friend said when I told her about my adventures at the recycling centre -"Oh, I would be embarrassed to do that..."  I can be shy at times, but when I want a book, and particularly when it's free, embarrassment is not in the equation.
You see, by the way, that I am now capable of making a mathematical reference, having reached Page 55 of  'Mathematician's Delight', see above.

Good night for now.