Very interesting about how an early formative experience of reading can
have such a profound effect on your intellectual direction, and in fact
on the whole direction of your life. It would make a good subject for an
online project: get people to send in their recollections of how they
first started to read. Experiences of libraries would be particularly
interesting, as we're now in an age where libraries are being closed
down or starved of funding in order to save money.
The library in Hoddesdon, the nearest town to where I grew up, was a
good one, an old-fashioned building with the children's section
upstairs, with clonky wooden floors and nice wide white-painted
window-sills where you could sit comfortably to read. Even more
influential for me, however, was a bookshop called The Bookworm in
Hertford, where I bought my collections of C S Lewis, Alan Garner, Henry
Treece - anything with either magic or swordfights in it, preferably
both - and later on Penguin Classics and Modern Classics. I think I was
profoundly affected by the design of books. As a boy I was always drawn
to books with illustrations that I liked, and when I got older it was
the look of Penguin books that particularly attracted me to them. I
resisted things like Faber and Everyman for years because I didn't like
the way they were designed.
- Edward
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