My Affection for Olde Bookes

I have a great love for old books; by which I mean not only books that are individually long in the tooth, but also books whose authors first put their contents to paper long ago. The picture at the left represents me reading the physically oldest volume that I own, a copy of John Tillotson's Complete Works from 1704. (Tillotson was an archbishop of Canterbury who had a formative influence on the thought of the English philosopher John Locke. I purchased the book several years ago, in the course of my dissertation research, because I could not obtain Tillotson's works in a contemporary edition.) The book is bound in sheepskin, which is now dessicated and cracked with age; yet the pages within are more or less free from blemishes, and remain very readable. I continue to find it a truly pleasurable exercise of the imagination to ponder all of the endless ways in which the world has changed since this book first appeared in a bookstall in London, or Norwich, or wherever it happened to be, in an age when men wore periwigs and had ornamented buckles on their shoes. I can sometimes achieve a similar effect with something other than a book: I own a Roman Egyptian coin from the reign of Diocletian, over sixteen centuries ago; and at times I like to hold it in my hand and attempt to picture to myself the persons whose fingers must have fished it from their pockets or purses to make their customary purchases, everyday items that many a museum of antiquities would now be happy to add to its collections. Old buildings have also stirred my thoughts in this way, from dilapidated houses to European cathedrals. Yet it is books that retain the strongest influence over me in that way, as perhaps it always will be. The distant past has always had a greater fascination for me than it has for most people, and also (what I think is somehow related to this) I am far more prey to nostalgia than are most of the people that I know. I have read a few studies (and not more than a few yet exist) of persons, now adults, who were placed for adoption as infants. These studies reveal that adopted persons tend to have a more intense interest in the past, in history, and in tracing the origins of things than do their non-adopted contemporaries; perhaps because our own past, our own history, and our own origins are shrouded in obscurity. It is disturbing, at times, to think that my interest in history may have been imprinted on my unconscious mind even from infancy, so that my decision to pursue a doctorate in history may not have been as free a choice as I once assumed. Yet it remains an infinitely engaging field of inquiry for me, even now, and if I was impelled to the study of it partly by psychological forces of which I was unaware, than this is almost certainly true of all of the important choices that every one of us must make about how we shall carry on with our lives. Adieu.