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The London Library
(Published in BuzzWords, December 2002)
It is worth the annual subscription to this fine lending library, founded in 1841. It makes you feel you're almost there, a real writer.
Up the stairs, the balustrade of polished mahogany, on the wall portraits of Great People with connections to the London Library: Dame Rebecca West, Rupert Hart-Davis, Rudyard Kipling and many other past readers.
More mahogany in the elegant reading-room, the large window delicately sectioned, the eyes of readers' like bees over their honey pots. I find a chair in an alcove and then take a number of books from the shelves. They smell fresh and green, not like the arid sterility of the tomes in the university libraries, where I pored over them, an anxious student.
Who is that over there? It is Richard Ingrams And isn't that Andrew Roberts? Over there, Margaret Drabble. Well, here I am. I sit down again, sweep a little dust from the desk, practise my autograph on the blank page.
Restless, I duck and dive amongst the delightful reference books: Whitaker's Almanac 1993, Who's Who 1999, The Guide to British Birds. I finally settle in brown-leather armchair in the corner and peruse the 1997 Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. As I sink into the chair, I begin to feel small.
I can't spell, I can't write, I can't do syntax, I'm a dud at etymology, semantics, analysing a sentence, having an original thought. Yet here I am.
One Great One taps another on the shoulder, a knowing laugh, a squeeze.
I retreat into the silent labyrinths, thousands of beautifully-bound volumes, the calm, the long journey ended. I would like to die now and have my flesh and bones transformed into a book cover. Inside there will be one pure white page of finest hand-made vellum. Each year on my birthday a new librarian would be allowed to place me anywhere on any shelf in the London Library.
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