Antiquarian books

In 1961-62 I was a visiting fellow in the MRC Social Medicine Research Unit, based at the London Hospital Medical College, on Whitechapel Road in the east end of London. The most interesting and productive work I did during that mind-expanding year was field-work in three industrial towns in the north of England, specifically, interviewing just under 100 randomly selected general practitioners in these towns, Stoke on Trent, Wigan, and Middlesborough. One rainy day I got off the inter-city express from London in Stoke a few hours before my first interview. An earlier interview I'd prearranged for that day had been cancelled, leaving me at a loose end for a couple of hours. It was raining as only it can in the north of England, steady, soaking rain that penetrated my raincoat in a matter of minutes as I ran from the station to the nearest cover about fifty yards away. On the corner, below street level, an electric light beckoned me into a little book shop stacked to the rafters with dusty, musty old books. Really, really old books. It was warm, dry, interesting, a perfect place to spend a couple of hours browsing the book shelves for whatever treasures they might hold. Alas, not a lot that interested me, mainly unreadable and perhaps forever unread volumes of sermons by long-forgotten dead clergymen. But among them were several very small volumes of a late 18th century equivalent of modern paperbacks, cheap, mass-produced reprints of classics. I emerged eventually into skies that had cleared a little, with three volumes of an edition of The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published by Chas Cooke of Paternoster Row in about 1790, for which I had paid sixpence each. We were desperately poor that year, I had to support a wife and two small children on a scholarship stipend intended for a single man. I went without a pint of beer with lunch that day, and had only a single sandwich, to compensate for my extravagance. These were the first really old books I ever owned. I wondered how many other people had read these well-thumbed little volumes before I got hold of them, and for how many they were, as Robinson Crusoe had been for me, the first book I ever read entirely on my own without help from any adult. I suppose those three books were the beginning or premonitory symptoms of bibliomania, the book-disease from which I narrowly escaped. A few years later when we lived in Edinburgh I had a slightly larger discretionary income and no other vices, and I began to add steadily and purposefully to my collection of really old books. The first was another bargain, the 8th edition of The Whole Works of that Excellent Practical Physician Dr. Thomas Sydenham, Corrected from the Original Latin, published by another Paternoster Row printer, J Darby, in 1722. I bought that in 1966; and for the next 30 years I was a fairly serious and purposeful collector of antiquarian books on medicine, public health sciences, and natural history -- my collection of natural history works included the 6th English and the first American edition of Darwin's Origin of Species and an early edition of the Voyage of the Beagle with beautiful steel plate engravings. I still have the Robinson Crusoe, and Darwin's account of the Voyage of the Beagle. But in 1995 I donated more than 700 other antiquarian and historically important modern books on public health sciences to the library of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, where they repose in the Roddick Reading Room, accessible to scholars and comparatively secure against theft and vandalism. I parted from them reluctantly but I think wisely. At the time we lived in a home that was demonstrably vulnerable to theft and break-ins; we had been burgled twice, and I feared that next time my precious books might be vandalized. The collection was valued at nearly $100,000 although of course I hadn't paid anything like that much for the individual books. I had almost stopped seriously collecting them about ten years earlier because collecting antiquarian medical and scientific books had become fashionable and wealthy collectors had driven prices skyward. I can visit the Roddick reading Room to consult my books at any time,but I'm content now to accumulate cheap paperbacks and to cling to a few reminders of former glory days, like those little books of Robinson Crusoe's adventures, and the Voyage of the Beagle, which as I think about it, could be added to the travel books I wrote of a few days ago.