Genius Fan

Let me tell you one of the great pleasures to be had in owning your own library (“It’s a bookcase for crying out loud! Not a library.”): I can pick a book off the shelves and, having forgotten that I had bought that volume, flick through its pages while stirring my porridge. There’s a pleasurable sense of ‘dipping in’ and discovering. In the book I selected this morning, Selections from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, I went to the Contents and looked down the list until something jumped out at me: ‘169. Beauclerk’s Wit [1780]…166’. (Topham Beauclerk was a great friend of Johnson.) In the entry, Boswell reports an observation of Johnson’s about Beauclerk: “No man ever was so free when he was going to say a good thing, from a look that said it was coming; or, when he had said it, from a look that expressed that it had come.” It seems Beauclerk had a poker face and knew how to use it. I dare say he would have been a good companion to have of an evening.

The downside – if one would call it that – of picking a random book off a shelf is that it more often than not won’t find itself back in its slot on the correct shelf…but will be left on the table, or taken upstairs or anywhere that it creates clutter. Consider the domestic tension that causes. On the upside, reading a book stops me scrolling on my mobile phone (anything that stops me doing that is a positive). Oh and another downside: random books divert me from the reading I should be doing. And on the upside, I’m less likely to lose 45mins reading a random book than I am on a mobile phone. I think the positives far outweigh the negatives. A book it is then, for the time it takes to stir and eat my breakfast.

Notes
Selections from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, (ed) RW Chapman (1927)
The Club. Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, Leo Damrosch (2019)