Ah, authors like Camus justify the time spent on verb conjugation. I had to trudge uphill to Keith Fawkes, walk in only to walk out (curse aisles that fit only one each), walk in again and climb up a ladder just to retrieve this book while this teddy bear slept in my coat pocket. How unjust!
It was such a lasting labour that whoever minded the till fell asleep. Upon waking up, he toppled a champagne flute (expectedly empty) and wrapped the book in a purple candy stripe bag. I received it, left £2 on the cluttered table and stumbled out into the dull world.
Hamlet, A Study in Scarlet and The Wind in the Willows — books
that took so many trains, their gilding are now faded and their spines frayed.
Old books sometimes come with surprises like equally old
photographs (to mark pages) or as pictured, old letters.
Spot the differences!
L: Five-year-old mock-vintage book on the youth of the author
R: Fifty-year-old decaying book on the decline of an old world. How apt!
Brown is so tiny he sleeps in a room made of Penguin books.
“My light and my salvation” — Psalms 27 illuminated by the
Mediterranean light. How I miss reading the bible on paper.
Shakespeare and Company has been housing so many books and people that it seems curiously natural to find a chessboard and piano there. I apologise to those who were distressed by my poor playing.
Notice the typewriter layout? QWERTZ keyboards have this uncanny ability of making QWERTY users like me curl up in a ball and weep. Now, I understand the plight of left-handers; what sort of hope do they have in this unreasonably right-handed world?
I am Sisyphus 