John Baxter: A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

A mad, book-collecting crony of your grandfather's has backed you into a corner at a party. He won't stop talking: books he's owned, the characters he bought them from, something about Graham Greene's mistress. Anecdotes and dropped names pile up on the carpet.

There's a gleam in the old man's eye which at first seems likeably self-mocking, and it's intriguing to be allowed a glimpse of a private obsession so close to your own — reading — and yet so far removed. Book collectors, the truly passionate ones, seem to be a tribe apart.

But the anecdotes are jumbled and badly paced, and the self-mockery is too stagey. Under it you begin to detect a note of contempt for you and your kind: mere readers, people stupid enough to take pleasure in a good book badly bound.

John Baxter has had an unusual life, in the course of which he's migrated from the Australian Outback to Paris, met many famous people, and assembled a personal library worth millions.

This book is part memoir, part anthropological study, taking us into the world of the book-obsessed, the people for whom books are sacred objects, valued for rarity, condition, and for unusual histories. A volume once owned by someone notable — Graham Greene's mistress, for instance — is an aristocrat among collectors' items.

For the non-collector, it's an interesting new perspective. But then you start noticing lines like this one: "Most librarians don't like books any more than butchers like lamb chops. Few read, and almost none collect the objects which they work with, which they seem to view merely as commodities."

The loud certainty with which Baxter assures us librarians don't read is as grating as his lack of generosity. Furthermore, the irony of a book collector throwing up his hands at the odious materialism of a profession whose members merely help people to find books to read, as opposed to hoarding them in climate-controlled glass-topped cases, completely escapes him.

I was intermittently fascinated by this book. I was also somewhat repelled. It functions reasonably well as a study of the book-collecting urge, but if you ever do meet Baxter at one of your grandfather's parties, I strongly suggest you pretend to spot Graham Greene's mistress on the other side of the room and make a quick getaway while he's distracted.

* Bantam, $27.95

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.