M’Lord, 
It was, indeed an interesting piece and a thousand thanks for making me aware of it.

I was encouraged to join the child’s section of my Dad’s library as a kid. It seemed to be a natural progression from my old written comics to the breathless challenge of reading ‘a whole book!’

And what marvellous books there were!

Biggles and Bunter, Alan Quartermaine and his many adventures, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and the incomparable HG Wells. In all of these books there was a barely subliminal message: Decent chaps always did the decent thing..Behaving honourably would always see you through. Simply keep a straight bat. Terribly naive stuff, I know, but still, it is extraordinary how much of it stays with you, which brings me to a point I feel wasn”t touched upon in your Aeon Essay.

The Church, regularly, banned books and burned them. When I was growing up, Hitler”s yes men burned millions of books, All over Europe there were Blackshirts and Brownshirts and all sorts of coloured shirts lined up and ready, at the drop of a hat, to burn every tome, novel and illuminated  manuscript they could get their hands on. Even rhe modern Irish Fine Gael party was formed out of the banned Irish Blueshirt movement of the 1930s. This was, to me, in the 1950’s, a terrifying awakening, the realisation, of which I was only half aware at the time, that there were  millions of people in the world only too happy to take up atrocity as a vocation. Millions of people who, at any moment might begin the process of destroying every book in the world.

I began to collect books. I dreamed of bundling them up in greaseproof paper and burying them at marked, secret locations, to be exhumed when the maniacs had gone. Before I had even begun to draw up my maps a book by Ray Bradbury ((Fahrenheit 451) showed me a different approach. Mr Bradbury suggests that if just one person memorizes just one entire book, and we multiply that by millions, then very quickly every book in the world would be committed to somebody”’s memory.

Those of us raised under the threat of Hitler, followed quickly by Stalin”s ‘Communism’, the Bomb, and the ‘Cold War’ had reasons to be afraid. Communism in the West was promoted as a dark and evil force, a Fascist force, a book-burning, Orwellian force, and capable, at any moment of completly overwhelming us.The West, stepping into the vacuum left by the Church, and adopting its tactics, led us to believe that the Devil, (the USSR ) was building weapons of such sophistication  that we”d all be wiped out tomorrow unless something was done! Only the West can save us, they cried. (By which they meant the USA, who were filling in for God) As a result of this we had the stupefyingly expensive  and utterly unecessary ‘Arms Race’. When the Wall fell, Soviet armaments were discovered to be Neolithic and the Yanks were discovered to be opportunistic, greed-driven liars.

I collect books out of fear of both the censer and the censor, and fear that one day there simply won”t be any books. I collect books because, until the inevitable next bout of book banning occurs, I can have absolute access to the quietly arrived at conclusions of some the brightest minds in the world.

Finally, I collect books to remind myself that, despite alI, we have lived in a remarkable time, a time of unprecedented freedom on all levels. It is just possible, viewed from the future, our time will be regarded as a Golden Age.