Here is the first book I ever bought for myself,
A Golden Land - pictured next to the most recent. (Actually the latter has been sitting in a parcel at my mums for months while I’ve been away. But, if not strictly the most recently purchased, it is the most recently read):
View attachment 11079
I remember very vividly the whole process of buying that first book. I would have been about six years old and very excited that I was making a choice for myself. I was with my mum. It was a winter’s afternoon and already dark outside the shop. The book was on one of those spinning wire racks. The newsagent’s we bought it from had been the stabling for a pub and still had a vaguely agricultural feel about it.
I suppose I bought it around a time midway through the period when the photographs in the more recent book were taken – and it seems quite eerie that I was bumbling about in the same - so close but so far away - world that those oddly mysterious and beautiful photographs were taken.
I’ve always thought that our more recent past – even the one we’ve been through ourselves – is somehow more mythical and ungraspable than a historical past we were never part of. And nothing about those two books, and the feelings they inspire, makes me think otherwise.
View attachment 11080 View attachment 11081