First Edition

I've started getting pretty weird around books. And not in a good way. Not in that endearing, love of knowledge sort of way that's a necessary requirement for being a straight-A student or at least the twelve year old heroine of a children's novel. It's a sickness of the anorak variety. It has nothing to do with what's inside books. This is a purely physical infatuation. It's all about the editions, baby. They drive me wild.

I mean, books are beautiful. They look great; both new and old, when crisp or when worn. They sound great. That dry rattling of riffling pages, or the muffled thud they make when hitting a desk or a floor. Fuck, they smell amazing. Open a copy fresh of the shelf, put it to your face, inhale...it's pant-dampening stuff, it really is.

Until recently, the problem was a manageable. Without money or any real need to buy books, I could keep it almost under wraps. Furtive glances at window displays, or the occasional thumb-through, that was all. But since starting Uni I'm buying books in a quantity I'm not used to; maybe two or three a week. These are mainly 'classics', which means they're out of copyright and come in roughly about as many editions as there are people. For any normal, un-fucked student, this would be fine. Just a matter of weighing price against availability and going for the compromise. But for me it's a torture and an ecstasy, a terrible vice, a blissful compulsion, a fucking gorilla on my back. I've become a publishing junky.

I spend hours in bookshops. I skulk along the aisles in dark glasses and a trench coat. Shop-assistants know me on sight. Children run away from me. I look up at the rows upon rows of Austens and Brontes and Dickens wearing an expressions like a stroke victim getting sucked-off. I run my finger over the spines and shudder with delight. I pluck them down from the shelves and riffle the pages from one thumb to another. Bent corners and dust-jacket tears fill me with a kind of revulsion. If I see someone opening them all the way down to the crease and letting the spine wrinkle I feel like stabbing them. I breathe heavily down their necks until they leave. I watch managers emerge and try dreaming up a legitimate reason to get rid of me. It's a bloody disgrace. He should be paying me. I'm the fucking book-master.

At night I wrestle with myself over the crucial debates until the early hours of the morning? Penguin Classics or Oxford World's? The stark black of the Penguins lends them a weighty, sombre authority; but the white and red of the Oxford Worlds feels more exciting, more seductive. But both are expensive. For the less funded obsessive there's always the filthy temptation of the Wordsworth Classics with their shoddy covers and coarse paper; a guiltless indulgence at £2 a go. Do we want an introduction? Too long a one feels messy, but one by a decent academic is always a plus; a trusted pimp guiding you into the arms of his whore. Dare we go hardback? A rare option, but it prevents against unsightly damage later down the line. Do we prefer plays to come separately or in a single edition? Do we like our poems collected, or in their original, slimly digestible forms? Do we want to end up with a library of uniformed, eugenic clarity, or go for the charmingly jumbled feel? Is it ever okay to lick them? These questions obsesses me to the point of madness.

And when I can't take it any more, when I can't stand the internal struggle, I picture the holy grail; the Faber & Faber poetry editions. Fuck me are they beautiful. The minimalist, bare coloured-covers, the regal font, the creative white space around the text...And that smell! Moistening the crotches of every pretentious tosspot around the country to atlantean levels. Sometimes, when the obsessing's at its worst, I stand by the window in the moonlight with my copy of The Whitsun Weddings in one hand and grimly toss myself off with the other. They're just that good.

And that's basically how I live my life! Diddle-di di!