What has evolved is by no means a collection, which would be rational, or academic, though it does contain some collections within it. Since I began atttending Ivanhoe Primary School in February 1951, I have accumulated and held on to books. ‘The bookbonic plague.’ Graham Ngyuen, 14 August 2014. The reading room of the public library, Stockholm (éole wind /cc). It is inscribed above the doorway to the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, 1911 (a wonderful building). John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644, a protest against censorship. I find it a beautiful place for contemplation and a good way to spend money 2. I haunt second-hand booksellers, as you do. What…what did that addictive nature of yours mutate into?īarry Humphries: Oh, other forms of addiction, of course.

Don't have to look in the newspaper and see what I did last night.Īndrew Denton: And you're safe here. I mean, I think it's just a realisation that it's, um…off the menu, you know. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.Īndrew Denton: But you haven't had a drink, famously, for more that 30 years, which is remarkable strength.īarry Humphries: I don't think it's a…not so much strength. I do then with my friends as I do with my books. But in the heap are always gems, epiphanies, pleasures. So much reading now is strategic, predatory, working favours, grazing for quotes, scavenging for scraps to be recycled. Jorge Luis Borges, translator: Alastair Reid, 'My Books', The Book of Sand, London 1979. I feel now that the quintessential words expressing me are in thiose pages which do not know me, not in those I have written. My books (which do not know that I exist) are as much part of me as is this face. It offers a critical theory on collecting as the capitalist disease of accumulation and possession, or a substitute for sexual activity: abstraction or regression and the harmony of a completed collection.īaudrillard, Jean, The System of Objects, Verso.

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