Library days…

Last weekend CHRIS BENNETT loaded up his car’s boot with books and set off for the journey to Gauteng.

BIBLIOPHILES are a rare breed. Collecting books is a very pleasing, to some of us, way of using time and spending money, and preferably not very much money.

Usually the love of books, in addition to what they contain, emerges in early life, the late teens or early twenties. I started collecting books, mostly reference works to do with language, in the 1970s when I was thirty something. I soon discovered the delights of TV Bulpin, a Cape writer who had a good nose for research, an abiding interest in the history of this country and a comfortable writing style.

It is interesting to note that the name of the company which owns the South Coast Herald is Caxton Press.

William Caxton (ca. 1420-1492) was one of the prime movers in the development of society, of learning and of teaching in the history of the world. He was in demand; in the times in which he lived he was one of the few who could read, and what is more he could write. It is said that he earned money as a letter writer for those unable to write, an occupation that must at once have been fraught with difficulty and awash with hilarity.

But it was his ingenuity as a printer that set the ball rolling and men’s minds free.

After learning the craft of printing at Bruges, in what is now Belgium, and Germany he returned to London and set up the first printing press at Westminster in 1476. The first English book he issued was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

My journey up to Hartbeespoort last week was to sell some books (Caxton was England’s first bookseller) and to see friends. I stayed with an old friend, Mike Benn, at his beautiful lodge in Meerhof. Mike developed an interest in antiquarian books when I was his neighbour in that village.

As with my own taste in books, Mike’s interest leans towards the South

African writers of the end of the 19^th and the early 20^th centuries; he also has, on display in the reception area of the lodge and in some suites, an excellent collection of the sketches of Melton Prior, an English war artist who accompanied Kitchener and others, and a French war artist who was, as we would say today, embedded with the Boer forces.

Prior to leaving the South Coast I had been working on the idea of a small library for the residents of our village.

Libraries are wonderful institutions. Membership of one gives you access to many others, and so almost any book you might like to read, or better still want to read, is available.

With the need for much more work to encourage young people to read, it might be a good idea for more English teachers to use libraries wherever they can and pass on the reading habit to their charges.

Without language, and essentially English, there is no future for our children.