"Everyman I will go with thee and be thy guide"
In 2000 the Millennium Commission decided to mark the occasion by donating a complete Everyman library to every school in the country. This was supported by funds from the National Lottery and seemed to me to be an absolutely marvellous idea. Not so. Within days of this being announced there was a queue of schools rejecting this offer saying it was a waste of time and money and some of them actually returned the books. No thank you.
This seems to me to be very dispiriting. I am sure there are schools who have these books on their shelves and are happy to have them there, but of course they didn't make the news, those foolish enough 
to air their views in public were so pilloried.
Yesterday I attended an annual book fair held in support of the NSPCC which is always packed out and always full of an incredible selection of books. I was pretty close to the head of the queue as always waiting for the doors to open (no surprise there then) and headed for the tables where the hard back books are laid out which are neglected at first as everyone heads for the paperbacks of which there are far more.
To my total astonishment and sheer delight it was pretty clear that one of the local schools, who shall be nameless, had decided to donate its Millennium Everyman Library to the sale. In each book there is a bar code stamp and a date label and they were all in virgin condition, they had never been borrowed. There were three other buyers there and I who fell upon these in delight and more or less cleaned up in about ten minutes flat.
Here is a list of those wonderful books that I took home with me yesterday:
- Pushkin - Collected Stores; Turgenev - Fathers and Children; Dostoevsky - The Adolescent (these will be perfect for the Russian Reading Challenge 2008)
- Penelope Fitzgerald - Offshore; Human Voices; the Beginning of Spring (in one volume)
- Margaret Atwood - Surfacing
- V S Naipaul - A House for Mr Biswas
- Giorgio Bassani - The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
- Charlotte Bronte - Vilette
- Henry James - The Collected Short Stories, Volumes 1 and 2
- Anthony Trollope - Phineas Finn (my old copy was falling apart)
- Edith Wharton - The Reef; Age of Innocence; Custom of the Country
- Charles Dickens - The Mystery of Edwin Drood; Our Mutual Friend
- Balzac - Cousin Bette
All these books were on sale for 50p. Yes, that's right 50p ($1). I could have had even more but knew perfectly well that I would never read Marcel Proust (I have tried) or Virgil and reluctantly left five volumes of Zola behind as well, also Updike and Thomas Mann. I just do not have the shelf room for these and am already wondering what to do with my haul yesterday. The situation re books is now becoming critical. As well as the above I came away with some lovely 'green' covered Viragos of which more later and a pile of fun reading - Agatha Christie, Dick Francis and odds and ends which will all be recycled in due course.
It breaks my heart to think that books like this were discarded, although grateful that they came my way, but it is a sad state when a copy of Bleak House for 50p is being ignored and people at the next table are fighting over the latest Grisham or Steele costing at least £1.50.
But I am letting my snobbery come to the fore and I mustn't do that. Each to his own.
