A Man And His Books Part One

A lot of sentimental nonsense has been said about books. But you have to admit they have something other media can't beat.

It's the package itself that is so enticing, with its promise of a hidden world more consistent and comprehensible than our own, fashioned by an intelligent creator and  contained between two small pieces of cardboard. For this we love the book as a form in itself, even before we begin to explore its contents.

Collections of books can enlarge that sense of mystery and promise, or betray it. What book lover has not felt cold and lost in a bookshop or library that fails to honour the authors, artists, editors and publishers who have created its contents? 

This honour is not simply a matter of efficiency - putting books in their right categories and keeping authors together. It's about choice, and character. The bookshop or library that tries to please everyone either becomes too meagre or too vast, and in either eventuality becomes nothing more than a collection of books. A great library reflects the soul of its owner or owners and has a collective story of its own.

Truly greater than the sum of its parts, the most wonderful library I have ever been in exists in a single bedroom public housing flat  in outback Australia. Its location is unimportant because wherever it was it would still create its own location, beyond time and space. Its story is of a man who has compulsively sought knowledge and meaning in his life. Raised to be a priest and forced to become a teenage resistance fighter, Alex's life story is one of both suffering and exploration, as he breaks free from the intense conditioning of the Catholic Church and discovers new worlds of philosophy, history, politics, science and religions.

Under his mother's tuition, Alex read his first books before he went to school, at the age of five. They were historical novels about Poland ... and among the very little fiction he has had time for.

As Alex's education progressed, much of it under Russian and German occupation, Alex's reading became increasingly limited to the confines of the Catholic Church. His mentor during the resistance was a Catholic priest, an intelligent and kindly man who nevertheless kept Alex on the straight and narrow road of the church, which proscribed the vast majority of books because they conflicted with its teachings. After the war, in a Polish seminary in Rome, Prus began tentatively exploring the world beyond, and by the time he was transferred to London he took on a job searching for unexploded mines in order to pay for his books.