Stories of Books and Libraries

Forewarned
by Saki
(1916)
 
Alethia Debchance sat in a corner of an otherwise empty railway carriage, more or less at ease as regarded body, but in some trepidation as to mind. She had embarked on a social adventure of no little magnitude as compared with the accustomed seclusion and stagnation of her past life. At the age of twenty-eight she could look back on nothing more eventful than the daily round of her existence in her aunt s house at Webblehinton, a hamlet four and a half miles
distant from a country town and about a quarter of a century removed from modern times. Their neighbours had been elderly and few, not much given to social intercourse, but helpful or politely sympathetic in times of illness. Newspapers of the ordinary kind were a rarity; those that Alethia saw regularly were devoted exclusively either to religion or to poultry, and the world of politics was to her an unheeded unexplored region. Her ideas on life in general had been acquired through the medium of popular respectable novel-writers, and modified or emphasised by such knowledge as her aunt, the vicar, and her aunt s housekeeper had put at her disposal. And now, in her twenty-ninth year, her aunt s death had left her, well provided for as regards income, but somewhat isolated in the matter of kith and kin and human companionship. She had some cousins who were on terms of friendly, though infrequent, correspondence with her, but as they lived permanently in Ceylon, a locality about which she knew little, beyond the assurance contained in the missionary hymn that the human element there was vile, they were not of much immediate use to her. Other cousins she also possessed, more distant as regards relationship, but not quite so geographically remote, seeing that they lived somewhere in the Midlands. She could hardly remember ever having met them, but once or twice in the course of the last three or four years they had expressed a polite wish that she should pay them

CONTENTS

Ray Bradbury, “Exchange”
Helen Oyeyemi, “Books And Roses"
Richard de Bury, from The Philobiblon
Umberto Eco, from The Name of the Rose
John Bale, from The Laborious Journey
Italo Calvino, “A General in the Library”
Lorrie Moore, “Community Life”
Mary Arnold, “A Morning in the Bodleian”
Elizabeth Taylor, “Girl Reading”
Evelyn Waugh, “The Man Who Liked Dickens”
Julio Cortazar, “A Continuity of Parks”
Ali Smith, “The Ex-Wife”
Isaac Babel, “The Public Library”
Elizabeth McCracken, “Juliet”
Max Beerbohm, “Enoch Soames”
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
Michel de Montaigne, from "Of Three Kinds of Association"
Samuel Pepys, from The Diary
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "On the Reading of Novels"
Alan Bennett, from The Uncommon Reader
Maxim Gorky, “The Icon-Painters”
Charles Lamb, “Two Essays of Elia”
Colette, “My Mother and the Books”
Saki, “Forewarned”
Italo Calvino, from If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler
Teffi, “My First Tolstoy”
Fay Weldon, “Lily Bart’s Hat Shop”
Jasper Fforde, “Wuthering Heights”
Helene Hanff, from 84 Charing Cross Road
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”
Ernest Rhys, from Everyman Remembers
John Evelyn, from Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library
Seneca, from De Tranqvillitate Animi
J. W. Von Goethe, from Conversations with Goethe
Azar Nafisi, from Reading Lolita In Tehran
Ray Bradbury, “The Library”

Edited by Jane Holloway