Lost Classics by Michael Ondaatje

Author:Michael Ondaatje [Ondaatje, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78115-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-30T04:00:00+00:00

2

During my late adolescence I was a book stealer. I loved books, not just to read but to own, and there was no way I could buy all I wanted. Because I stole for love, I stole self-righteously. It took time for me to realize that if Scribner’s could afford my pilfering, I was doing palpable damage to places like the Holliday Bookshop. At the age of eighteen I stopped altogether.

In 1952 I moved to France with my wife and daughter. In Paris we became close friends with Tony and Eve Bonner. Two years later, the four of us decided to try living in Majorca, reputedly pleasant and unquestionably cheap. Tony was as much a bookworm as I. Faced with an indeterminate stay on a then out-of-the-way island, we took a brief trip to London to stock up on useful books. We spent most of our daylight hours in Foyle’s, viewing and reviewing its innumerable shelves.

It was during our first morning in that bookstore that I at last saw a copy of On Growth and Form (Cambridge University Press, revised edition, 2 vols.). It was late afternoon of the following day when I mustered the courage to steal it. I was by then in a pitiful state. I hadn’t stolen a book in years; my earlier recklessness had deserted me (I was now a husband and father). Even in pluckier days I would have hesitated before smuggling two fat volumes out of a store milling with attentive salesmen. But the unforeseen resurgence of a title pronounced once ten years earlier had set me trembling with superstitious lust. (I could not begin to contemplate paying the twenty pounds it cost—almost two hundred pounds in today’s money).

I spent an inwardly frantic, outwardly reasonable hour executing my theft, moving the two volumes separately and in stages from the middle of the second floor towards the ground-floor exit, camouflaging the manoeuvre by bringing books I planned to buy to the cashier nearest my point of escape. At last On Growth and Form was settled, not too conspicuously, on a rack between my cashier and the nearby door. I paid for my other books—over a dozen, as I remember—and on my way out picked up my covert objects of desire and walked out into Charing Cross Road. I did not look back. I did not run. I blessed the pedestrian throng.

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